Woman astonished as stranger helps her uncover amazing family secret by chance

19 November 2023 , 12:00

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Felice Hardy traced back the lessons she learned from her family, even after many of them were long gone (Image: Mike Lang)

Felice Hardy was a travel writer on a bit of a background excursion with her kids in Austria when she ran into a woman who offered to help her learn her family history.

Hardy knew that her grandparents immigrated from Hungary to London along with her mother, who was 12 at the time. But Hardy didn't know what a rich history awaited her when she began combing through the records - with the help of the kind stranger turned translator who had crucial knowledge on how to access vital historical records.

While she knew her mum and grandmother had been tennis stars at Wimbledon, she learnt that they really had to persevere to be professional athletes in the UK after World War II. She also discovered that her grandmother had to beat a pretty well-known tennis star to qualify - and from that, an incredible chunk of family history was uncovered.

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Liesl Herbst was a national tennis champion in Vienna, until it became too dangerous to stay

"When she had to qualify to play at Wimbledon in 1939, she had to play three different women tennis players, and one of them was a woman called Susan Billington, and she beat all three of them. And so she qualified," Felice told the Daily Mirror.

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“But Susan Billington was the grandmother, became the grandmother of Tim Henman who's a very well-known British tennis player. I mean, one of the best British tennis player players we've had. And so I had no idea.”

“Obviously, my grandmother hadn't been born just as I hadn't been born. But, at the time, you know, so I now know that my grandmother beat Tim Henman's grandmother, which is when I give a talk," the author laughs.

Hardy is now on a book tour to promote the book based on her grandparent's story, "The Tennis Champion Who Escaped the Nazis: Liesl Herbst’s Journey, from Vienna to Wimbledon," now on Amazon. The story Hardy knew began in 1930, when at the age of twenty-six, Liesl Herbst, the Austrian National Tennis Champion, her husband David, and their daughter Dorli, arrived in Britain after escaping the Nazis.

Felice here as a child with her grandfather, David, who loved to travel

When asked what surprised her most about her research, Hardy told The Mirror: “My grandmother had two sisters... she only ever mentioned one. She never mentioned the sister with disabilities, and she doesn't appear in many photos either. And I think the reason for that she's the middle, the older sister is called Irma.”

“And, she was not mentioned much because my grandmother felt most guilty about her, I think, and her mother, her widowed mother, because she felt she could have helped them to escape and that they were helpless on their own.

"Whereas her other sister was more, you know, did her own thing and was a strong woman and had a husband and, and a child, but she felt really guilty about this other sister.”

“And, finding out she had another sister, finding out she had a mother called Felice. I had no idea that I was named after my great-grandmother. No one told me no one told me that."

And Hardy was happy to be able to put an ending to that story. While her grandmother lived with lifelong guilt, Hardy learned that the sister she was forced to leave behind in Austria had a more complicated story than anyone could have thought.

David and Liesl's wedding in 1924, before they had to escape the Nazi's (Felice Hardy)

“My grandmother's middle sister, one called Trude, was imprisoned in a camp with her husband and daughter in Slovakia. It was a labour camp. So it wasn't a death camp. But they were rescued by the partisans who opened the doors of the camp and let everyone out. I didn't know the story. My grandmother didn't know the story.

"But I found out because I went to a museum in Slovakia where they have all the history of what happened at that time. So my grandmother's middle sister, Trude, was let out of the camp, and she then joined the partisans, the resistance with her husband and daughter."

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"And, well, they were finally captured and killed, sadly, but, you know, they were all shot, they were lined up and shot into a great big trench, shot in the back of the neck. So I didn't know any of this. And my grandmother always thought that her sister was long dead, that the Nazis had come into the village and shot them. Well, that's not what happened. There was a much longer, bigger story which I found out."

The Tennis Champion who Escaped the Nazis by Felice Hardy is available on Amazon and other retailers

Felice Hardy was in for a surprise when she visited Austria with her children - as she began to learn more about her family history (Martyn Payne)

Hardy has found that by publishing the book, she's not only learned more about her family history than they could have ever dreamed to know but that her course of action has inspired others to take down their family's stories.

“Ok, the main thing I've learned by writing this book, and when I give a talk, I tell people this - it's so important for the younger generation to ask their parents and grandparents about their childhood, about their upbringing, about their heritage. Because if you don't, that will be lost when those people have gone, you've lost those stories."

And for Felice and her family, finding out that her family was Jewish and converted to escape the Nazis and rising post-war antisemitism in Britain, has helped her reconcile her own story. “Yeah, I regret it because I know nothing about the Jewish Jewish religion. Until I went, until I started my research, I'd never been inside a synagogue. I didn't know any of the holidays. I didn't know what they were. I didn't know any of the cultural side at all.”

Liesl and Trude on the steps of their home, before they were separated by war (Felice Hardy)

Felice's mother and grandmother

"Nothing because my mother completely rejected all religion when she was a child of 12 when she came to England," continued Hardy. “And suddenly she was pulled out of her school and taken to England and had to start all over again, which was very difficult if you were German-speaking at the time because when World War Two started, people were very suspicious of anyone German-speaking."

“They thought they were the enemy, even if they, they weren't, they were Jewish, and they were refugees. But that didn't matter. People weren't treated very well, and there was also a lot of anti-semitism, not just in mainland Europe, but in England as well, just as there is today," Felice goes on.

Dorli, Felice's mother, played double's tennis with her mother, Leisl (Felice Hardy)

Felice began her grandparents' story with Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. It was an attack against the Jewish population in Austria. And even after her grandparents escaped, they would never shake the feeling that it could happen again.

Felice wrote about a moment in her book that many Jewish authors have written about as well - the moment her mother would remind her not to talk about her Jewish roots. "Because anti-Semitism may seem dormant, but it’s only a matter of time before it will erupt when you least expect," her mother would say. It's something that's still relatable now, Felice points out.

“I'm surprised, as I'm sure my grandparents were, that people could suddenly be so taken in by Hitler and the Nazis, and they followed, they did what he said, and they hated Jews."

"Not just Jews, they hated Black people, gay people, disabled people, anyone that wasn't just the white normal, you know, and that can happen again and again, and it is scary that ordinary people can get pulled into this, like mass hysteria.”

“And I think, you know, it can happen again, and it does happen throughout history. It happened before Hitler, and it's, you know, in places like Ukraine and Lithuania and Russia. And it will, and it happens again because, when you get people, they just follow blindly.”

“It was quite hard for them to be allowed to stay. But when they did, they embraced it. And my grandfather started up his business again, and they learned English."

"But they had it very hard, just like people today have it very hard when they have to leave their country because of war to start again. I think it's good that they were given a chance, and I feel people should be given a chance."

You can read Felice Hardy's book, "The Tennis Champion Who Escaped the Nazis: From Vienna to Wimbledon," by buying it on Amazon or requesting it from your local library.

Yelena Mandenberg