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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
But the three Mendel children, as well as their Omama Toni, remained in Canada.During the half-dozen years that I knew her, Toni lived in Oakville, a suburb of Toronto, on the shore of Lake Ontario. That site may well have reminded her of the second home she used to own which was located on the Zürcher Lake in Switzerland. It had afforded Toni and Hertha’s family their first refuge from Hitler’s Germany. Toni and her family had been politically astute enough to recognize very early the looming danger posed by the Nazis, and Toni had, indeed, sold her Wannsee property and left Germany a year before Hitler became chancellor in 1933. As a result, she had been able to leave with her considerable fortune intact, which sustained her and her extended family in the years to come. Ten years later, it helped to sustain me, too.(L-R) Ruth, Bruno, the author, and Hertha Mendel, Canada, 1943. (All photos courtesy the author)I saw Toni on her occasional visits to Hertha’s family on Bedford Road, but more often, I visited her at her Oakville home, which I could reach on my bicycle. Because the Mendels left Germany so early, they were able to bring with them some of the art work, books, and furniture of their Wannsee home, with the result that both Toni’s Oakville apartment and the Mendels’ Toronto home preserved the ambiance of their Berlin abode. Of my visits for tea with Toni I particularly recall her eagerness to learn of the latest developments in the arts, in science, in politics, and how I viewed the progress of the war. Her wide-ranging curiosity must also have intrigued Einstein, whose interests ranged far beyond physics. He was, for example, deeply devoted to music and he played chamber music whenever he could, often three times a week. In the Berlin days, Einstein was, moreover, actively engaged in the tumultuous politics of the Weimar period, and at the same time, he was intensely involved in the design and production of gyrocompasses, engineering work for which he was awarded several patents.Einstein believed strongly that science
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