“The road goes ever on and on”
- J.R.R. Tolkien
“I don’t want any nasty, soggy chips. I want mine crisp unt light brown.”
- U-boat captain, Dads’ Army, “The Deadly Attachment”
Marian Adelman, 82, born October 24th, 1929, in northwestern Austria, lives with her husband, Benjamin Turner, 77, in Bowthorpe, Norwich. He is a retired nuclear scientist, chemist and chemistry teacher; she is a retired administrator who worked for UEA for 29 years from 1972 to 2001. Marian was one of four children born to Austrian health inspector Morgan Adelman (1892-1957) and Czech-born electrician (1919 – 1935), radio operator (1935-46), later sound technician (1946-58), lecturer (1958-61) and singer (1960-7) Elena Colder (1899 – 1974), who was the daughter and sole child of a diplomat and his wife heiress to a transportation firm fortune – the business had been begun as a shipping firm by his wife’s Italian maternal grandfather, Ricardo Henerici (1842-1908) in the summer of 1867, and continued by his daughter Evangelina Alciers (1868-1932) following her brother (Aldo Henerici, 1866-1896) the original heir’s death in 1896. Morgan Adelman, whose paternal great-great-grandfather, Edwin Adelman (1785-1860) had been a Jewish doctor in his native Copenhagen, had so-called Christian agnosticism in common with his wife, whom he met in September 1920 in western Czechoslovakia, while working as an internal inspector for the government building she was helping to wire together. They were both music-loving socialites who had many friends of many backgrounds, including Jewish people, who included Elena’s oldest childhood friend, Amanda Lehmann (1900 – 1980), who would go on to become a Holocaust survivor. Morgan and Elena married in Plzen, Czechoslovakia, the same city in which they met in March 1924, and their first child Philip was born there in October 1925. Marian was their second oldest child, born in that same Czechoslovakian city, Plzen, in October 1929. In January 1931, the family moved from Czechoslovakia to Linz, Austria; it was in Austria, after Elena inherited her family’s business in 1932, becoming a nominal CEO whose only difference from her old life was her vastly increased paycheque and hour-long meetings once every three months to discuss the business, that they had their final two children, Lindsey (born in May 1933) and Aaron (born in July 1935). After the Anschluss of 1938 converted Austria into a province of Nazi Germany, both Morgan and Elena joined the underground resistance movement, helping many people who were undesirable to the Nazis to escape into Switzerland, Liechtenstein and France. In August 1941, a fraud being perpetuated by Morgan as part of their Resistance activities was detected by the Nazis; he was arrested and imprisoned in Linz that November. The Nazis arrested their mother in January 1942; she was convicted of fraud and sent to prison; arrangements were made for the children to be moved to a foster home in Innsbruck; the parents in this case were hardcore Nazis who made their lives miserable, and Philip organised their attempted flight to Switzerland. However, he accidentally left details of their escape on a piece of discarded, binned notepaper, and shortly after the four departed on March 2, 1942, ostensibly for a day trip to Lustenau, in western Austria on the Swiss border, for a fictional Nazi-organised war careers day, their plan being to stay with Philip’s friend (a co-conspirator who called them from Switzerland) overnight , then claim to have missed the return train, their scheme was detected, and they narrowly escaped arrest at their train’s destination; on the early evening of March 3, they were separated as the pro-Nazi authorities closed in on them in the western Austrian Alps; Philip was arrested and Aaron, who was with him, transported back to Innsbruck. Marian, eleven, found herself in Switzerland, being received four miles west of the capture point by their arranged reception party (shortly thereafter she was transported to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where she lived for the next few years), and 8-year-old Lindsey disappeared entirely. Were it not for the fact that Philip had been protecting his younger brother, he would likely have been shot, but instead the 16-year-old was transferred to the same Linz prison as his father; his father had received a sentence of six years, his mother nine; he received a sentence of four years for abduction and dereliction of duty. His foster parents, guardians of three other children other than their own three, two of them sisters, were censured for their physical treatment, but nothing more. Marian desired to return to Austria to look for Lindsey, after the incident had been reported in the Linz newspapers with reference to her disappearance, but she was prevented from doing so. In point of fact, Lindsey had spent 14 hours hiding in underbrush before travelling northeast; she walked and disguised her face to hitch lifts; eventually passing through Czechoslovakia to the Ukraine, where she entered an orphanage in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk as “Rose Wessel”; she was injured there in 1944 enough to lose her memory; deaf in one ear and believing herself to be Rose Wessel, a Ukrainian orphan, she took jobs as a cleaner and waitress before moving to Kiev in 1949; she attended college there from 1950-1952 and then moved to Moscow to be a servant; she joined the civil service in April 1958 and became a KGB spy from January 1961; she was arrested in Oxford by British authorities in February 1965 and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; after seven and a half, she was released in late January 1973; having turned against the Russians in 1968 after their invasion of and tactics in Czechoslovakia, she applied to study biology; was accepted to do so in Edinburgh from September 1975 after several rejections; graduated in 1979, still as Rose Wessel (Rose Wisla as of 1955; Rose Wesley as of 1969), and became a nature writer. In 1982 she met music journalist and part-time bass guitarist Robert Wilson, born in December 1944; they would go on to have a relationship from early 1983 which would survive a four-month hiatus in mid-1985 and become a marriage in October 1988. Marian’s efforts to track Lindsey down had proved fruitless; they met again quite by chance when “Rose” was doing a project for her alma mater in Edinburgh in September 1984, and chanced upon Marian when the latter was the previous appointment holder with the dean; they met in the dean’s office; they got to talking, and a few days later Rose’s memory reasserted itself, and she remembered her life as Lindsey and how it ended. In the meantime, Marian had left Switzerland for France in September 1946, after the release of her family from Nazi imprisonment the previous year, after British forces had reviewed the question of their sentences’ legitimacy and declared all three of them null and void. Aaron was returned that summer to his parents’ custody, and they appealed for the whereabouts of their daughters, causing Marian to come forward, partly after Philip’s information helped narrow the search for her to Switzerland. Marian attended university in Lille from 1948 to 1952, where she learned business studies and English. She moved to Le Havre in 1956, where she met her English husband, Andrew Kennedy (b.1931) while doing an admin job in October 1957; he was working for the catering firm she was administrating. They began a relationship, moved to Calais in the summer of 1960, and married there in March 1963. They moved to Southampton in August 1964, where she had her first child, Lauren, in January 1966; she was followed by Nicholas in August 1970. Marian and Andrew had moved to Ipswich in 1974 and to Edinburgh in 1981; the two sisters had lived in ignorance of each other in the same city for over three years before they met and recognised each other. Rose/Lindsey still lives in Edinburgh; Marian and Andrew moved from there to Norwich in 1991. The sad side of this is that Lindsey, who continued to be known as Rose to her friends and largely to herself, was never revealed as alive to her parents; her father Morgan had died in 1957 and her mother Elena in 1974. After his release from Nazi prison, Philip went to the University of Munich from 1947 to 1953 and eventually became a nurse; he moved from Berlin to Copenhagen in 1955, where in 1957 he met his future wife, Danish physician Sara Mendecke, born in April 1924; they married in northern Denmark in July 1965 and moved to Sweden in January 1968, where they still live. Aaron, the youngest son, attended the University of Paris from 1954 to 1958 to study literature and drama; he became an advertising executive in Paris from 1959, abandoned it in February 1964 to pursue a career as an actor, which was successful from then until November 1969, when he became a set and costume designer; he began dating 46-year-old 1955 Luxembourgian immigrant music writer and radio presenter Carla Jollice in November 1971; he helped raise her son, Dion, then 11, from a previous relationship; he had been born in February 1960; her relationship with his French father had lasted from the summer of 1958 to the spring of 1964. Aaron died in Paris on September 15th 2007, aged 72.
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