A dying wish, forgotten boxes, and a lost Holocaust archive rediscovered
UBC Creative Writing professor Timothy Taylor uncovers his family’s hidden wartime history through his grandfather’s diaries and letters, to be preserved with help from the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and UBC Library.
Ursula Taylor was near death when her daughter Shelagh asked her about the boxes in the attic.
“Give them to Timo,” she said. “He’ll know what to do with them.”
Timo was Shelagh’s younger brother, Canadian novelist Timothy Taylor. Timothy, now a Creative Writing professor at UBC, didn’t hear that dying wish of his mother back in 2006. In fact, he didn’t learn of it until 2019, after his father Richard had died.
That’s when Shelagh drove to Vancouver from Edmonton and unloaded a vehicle full of boxes onto his living room floor. The boxes contained a decade’s worth of diaries, letters, photographs, and other mementos kept by their grandfather, Felix Kuppenheim — Ursula’s father — in the 1940s, when he fled Germany for Ecuador during the Holocaust. Felix died in 1978.
In fact, Taylor did not know what to do with them. But he is figuring it out. With support from the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and UBC Library, he has undertaken a multi-year project to have the records digitized, translated, and turned into a searchable database that will be accessible to researchers all over the world.
“This archive has educational value because you get to see, with rare granularity, right into somebody’s personal experience of being Jewish at that time: escaping, what flight looked like, what exile looked like, and a deeply troubled psychology that results,” said Taylor, who knew his grandfather at a time when he was too young to ask about his past. “The little bit that I’ve read, I’ve already seen that there’s an angry and thoughtful man there that I never knew.”
Felix Kuppenheim grew up in Pforzheim near the Black Forest, but had moved his young family 400 kilometres north to Münster by the time Ursula was born. He was the son of Pforzheim’s only gynaecologist, Rudolf Kuppenheim. Rudolf had delivered thousands of the town’s babies over his 40-year career, and when the Nazis came knocking for him and his wife Lily on October 22, 1940, he still had some morphine in his medicine cabinet. They were given an hour to pack their things. They took the morphine instead.
Felix came back to Pforzheim for his parents’ funeral, but as the townspeople swarmed him on the street to offer their condolences, a well-meaning official quietly advised him that the Nazis were taking notice, and he should leave. He had a visa for Ecuador, thanks to his engineering credentials. His wife and children had none, so he made his 25,000-kilometre journey to safety alone.
The boxes contained evidence of that journey. Felix’s passport. His typed itinerary. Receipts for meals at towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. And a boarding pass for a ship called the Rakuyō Maru, which carried Felix across the Pacific before it was sunk by American submarines four years later.
Through it all, and especially during the eight years he was alone in South America before reuniting with his family, Felix kept diaries and corresponded with his brother Hans, a physicist who had fled to New York.
Taylor has read only a fraction of those 10,000 pages.
“Those guys were really well read, so the exchanges between them are high-level conversations about politics and what’s happening in the world, and it makes for pretty interesting reading,” he said.
What interested Taylor most, however, was learning what he could about his mother and her experience during the war. She hadn’t talked about this much. Taylor recalls one particular night as a child when the family was driving home to West Vancouver from Port Moody and passed by the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) grounds.
Ursula broke down in the car.
Timothy and his siblings didn’t get it. They loved the PNE. But Ursula had seen the searchlights, and remembered the air raids.
“It was pretty intense,” Taylor said. “She had a bad war, as they used to say.”
As he combed through the material, Taylor honed in on 1944, when the family went into hiding near the end of the war. He knew the area of Germany but hadn’t been able to narrow it down. Then he came across a photo of his mother. She was 14 years old and carrying a little blond girl whom Taylor did not recognize. The caption bore the scribbled name of a farming town near Münster.
In December, Taylor and podcast producer Anthony Cantor got help from the region’s weekly agricultural newspaper, which published the photo. Later that day, they heard from the little girl, now in her eighties.
“That’s Ursula Kuppenheim,” she told them. “She was brought to stay on our farm, and she was my nanny.”
Taylor is going to speak with the woman who knew his mother 80 years ago, during the darkest year of her life. It’s the most personal of many threads the archive has given him and Cantor to follow for a six-episode podcast series, funded by the VHEC and produced by The Walrus Lab, called The Hidden Holocaust Papers: Survival, Exile, Return. It launched on January 27.
Meanwhile, the work at the UBC Library Digitization Centre continues. With the help of AI, a volume of letters that might have taken a human an entire career to translate should be ready for VHEC and UBC Library to make available to the public by 2027.
“The details of what it contains is sort of a thrilling mystery,” Taylor said. “I don’t 100-per-cent know — but I do know that it’s going to be of huge interest to researchers.”
So, is this what Taylor was supposed to do with the boxes? Is this what his mother meant?
Perhaps she wanted the story told, even if it was too traumatic to talk about herself. This was pointed out to him by a German publisher named Felicitas von Lovenberg, whom he interviewed for his podcast and whose grandfather was instrumental in getting Ursula into hiding.
“Your mother said that because you’re a writer,” von Lovenberg told him. “You’re supposed to write about this.”
Taylor is finishing up a book proposal, which he plans to take to publishers in the next few months.
“What is driving me forward is that my mom seemed to think I would know what to do, and I have to find out exactly what it was she was so sure I would know to do,” Taylor said. “I’m discovering as I go here. I know that I have to push it forward to make that discovery, and that now feels worth every ounce of effort I put into it.”
