Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
It is still raining. I could hardly wait to come home from school, as Aunt Bertha, she is Grandfather’s sister, would be here and I love her. She is big and fat and comfortable and poor. Of course she isn’t poor like the children in the orphanage or like little Oliver Twist, who had to live in a horrible school where he didn’t get enough to eat and when he held out his dish to ask for more porridge, he was beaten. Alma told me this story and I know there is more to the book but so far, this is the only thing I know about Oliver Twist and this is because I wouldn’t eat my porridge and she wanted to show me how glad I should be to have any at all, but I wasn’t.
When I first read about Aunt Bertha, I thought she might be the same Bertha with whom my mother stayed when she arrived in San Francisco in 1939. As always, Bertha turns out to be a common family name. This Bertha was my grandmother Helene’s aunt — the sister of her father and of Hilda’s grandfather. She married a cousin whose last name was Fulda. My grandmother wrote about their son Erwin and we saw this photo of them together in Vienna.
