Stella Siegmann's long-awaited visa from the British was finally received in August 1939 and she moved to England where, a few months later, she married a fellow Austrian exile called Wolf Rotenberg.
[1] She would also always remember the religious studies teacher challenging the mainstream antisemitism at the predominantly Roman Catholic school, telling the children that "Jews are human too".
When she was about fifteen Stella Siegmann and her brother Erwin took part on a schools-arranged camping break during which she made the acquaintance of Jura Soyfer who at the age of nineteen was in the process of embarking on his own career as a precociously gifted and politically committed writer.
Although the transformation came about through military invasion, there was strong support across Austria for the idea of a united German state which extended well beyond hardened Nazi activists.
[5] Stella Siegmann who as a young adult had worn her ethnicity relatively lightly, now found refuge in Judaism which she came to see as the embodiment of non-violent principles of charity and respect for the law.
Her brother had secured Swedish entry documents for them, but the German authorities were disinclined to let them leave the country without payment of prohibitively inflated fees to the government Vermögensverkehrsstelle(loosely, "Property Transaction Office.").
[5] Stella Siegmann took work as a domestic servant in Leiden, running the home of a single forty-year-old man whose aspirations for her were evidently inappropriate.
[1][3] Stella Rotenberg was troubled for a long time by the knowledge that she had simultaneously applied for residence and a work permit in two different countries: Her experiences in the Netherlands were in some respects disappointing.
As international tensions increased the governments in western Europe took a less welcoming approach to Germany's many refugees, and during her time working at the orphanage she was required to report to a police station every day.
In August 1939, shortly before the outbreak (for England and Germany, if not yet for the Netherlands) of the Second World War, the long-awaited visa for Britain arrived, and Siegmann immediately traveled by boat across the North Sea to London.
There are, however, powerful indications that she soon encountered a darker side to English society, through her work in the Colchester psychiatric hospital: these gave rise to darkly bitter resonances in several of her later poems.
[1][3] Living and working in Colchester meant that Stella Siegmann was cut off from almost all the German and Austrian exiles who had come to England and who stayed in and around London.
She spoke no English, but necessity and her superb ear for language enabled her to learn it very quickly, so that her greater concern became that she would forget her German.
Bernhard and Regine Siegmann were deported towards the east on 20 May 1942 and disappeared, like thousands of others, a few days later, although the detailed circumstances of their killings were at that time unclear.
Subsequent research confirms they were almost certainly murdered, either at Auschwitz or else during an unscheduled halt in a wooded area by the train transporting victims towards a death camp.
Erwin Siegmann, her brother, made plans to return "home" to postwar Austria, but antisemitic incidents that he came across during a visit caused him to abandon the idea: when he died in 1990 he was still living in Stockholm.
Her poetry, which she continued to write, reflected the sense of loss in respect of her parents' murder and the life she had led in Vienna before the coming to power of National Socialism.
Native-born English neighbours were friendly up to a point, but acceptance was never entirely unqualified and her written work continued to reflect a sense of social isolation consistent with the Rotenbergs' position as foreign-born exiles.
She also continued to be haunted by a belief that being cut off from daily use of the German language was diminishing her skill as a practitioner of it, and she feared that losing her fluency also removed one of her last surviving connections to her murdered mother.
[1][3][5] Publication of her work was not on Stella Rotenberg's agenda during the 1940s and 1950s, and for a German language poet living in England the opportunities were any event limited.
For a long time Stella Rotenberg's work remained unknown in Austria: that was a fate she shared with a number of exiled Austrian authors who after the war were unwilling unable to re-establish links with the country of their upbringing.
[2][11] By this time a number of uncomfortable issues relating to the National Socialist years that had been subject to a widespread if informal vow of silence since 1945 were beginning to be discussed more openly, and this coincided with greater recognition and a growing academic interest in Rotenberg's work, notably in Austria and West Germany.
[2][9][12] Back in Austria, in 2001 Stella Rotenberg became the first recipient of the Prize for Resistance Writing in Exile awarded (since then) annually by the Vienna-based Theodor Kramer Society.