Ursula's Story
From Berlin to Bayview
Description:... Ursula's Story is a fictionalised memoir of the author's mother. Born into a wealthy family with a Jewish father and Protestant mother in 1913, Ursula, a passionate artist, grows up in Berlin against the backdrop of Hitler's rise to power. Beautiful, but naive, she studies art whilst working as a fashion model, and later as an interpreter at the 1936 Olympics. Determined to flee the Nazis, she dreams of escape. Luck finds her a job; first as a nanny in Rome, and later with an English circus where she shares lodgings with a snake charmer. Almost broke, she moves to London and mixes with émigrés, until a chance encounter in a club leads her to propose to her first 'real' Englishman, who is immediately smitten. Against all odds, and through the horrors of the Blitz, the marriage lasts four decades. Finding herself a widow, she follows her daughters to Sydney where she eventually settles in Sydney's Northern Beaches. Through charm, resilience and good humour she learns to adapt to whatever life throws at her.
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