Our great-aunt Malci was our family’s last living link with Vienna. She was my father’s aunt, an eccentric figure on the fringes of our lives, to whom my two brothers, my sister and I would write monthly letters in schoolbook French, the language we barely had in common. She knew only a few words in English and we spoke no German.
Her full name was Malvine Schickler, and she was the only member of the family to have returned to Vienna after the second world war and stayed. Every few years, she would visit us in London and we three boys would be told to hide away our toy guns as a gesture of discreet compassion for a woman who had survived the Holocaust.
