Shortly before Christmas 1940, Klara Mehlich Seuffert sits in her house in Cologne, deeply saddened. Her two sons Röbi and Walter have to go to war. Her husband, the successful painter Robert Seuffert, is living apart from her. And her daughter Lotte lives in England, where she married and gave birth to Klara’s granddaughter Clare in October 1940. As direct contact with Lotte has become almost impossible, Klara begins to write a very long letter. With almost 150 entries, it becomes a war diary about nights of bombing and hardship, fear for the children and longing for them, Klara’s abhorrence of the Nazis and her prayers for a reunion with her loved ones. Clare only finds her grandmother’s diary many years after the war.
In this blog we published, from 2020 till 2024, Klara’s entries in her diary exactly 80 years after she had written them. Now the complete diary is available as a book: