LAHORE: Memories of places where people live for long, especially in their childhood, usually stay with them for the rest of their lives and its but natural that they have an urge to revisit those places to rekindle old days.

Ms Hazel Kahan, who was born in Lahore to a Jewish couple and spent her early years here, shared her memories with the audience on Saturday at a Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) session titled 55-Lawrence Road -- the address of the house where they used to live.

Moderated by Aliya Naseer Farooq, a writer and sociologist from Islamabad, the session had eminent architect Nayyar Ali Dada and painter and documentary filmmaker Ms Shireen Pasha as panelists, besides Ms Kahan.

Opening the session, Mr Dada said that like people, old buildings too had a character that is shaped by those who use them. Introducing Ms Kahan, he said that her father Dr Selzer and mother Dr Kate were both known medical practitioners in Lahore. He said Ms Kahan was a psychologist and came to Lahore all the way from New York, USA, on the invitation of LLF organisers and would speak about her house on Lawrence Road that used to be a marvellous area.

Ms Kahan said she would share her memories with the audience through a slideshow that she had been presenting at various places in the USA. She said her grandparents lived in Poland from where they moved to Germany. Her parents, both of them medical doctors, had to migrate in 1937 from Nazi Germany, where Hitler had banned medical education and practice for the Jewish people, to British India.

She said that her father tried to settle in various cities in what is now India, including Bombay, but he was not welcomed there. He got disappointed and was about to move to the US when someone suggested that they should also consider Lahore to settle in and start their medical practice.

“So Lahore gave us refuge when we badly needed it,” said Ms Kahan.

Later during the session Ms Pasha read out a letter written by Dr Selzer in which he wrote that what struck him most about Lahore was the architecture of the houses and that every respectable house in the city had a huge lawn. As his wife Dr Kate loved flowers and gardening, Dr Selzer wanted to have a house with a huge lawn and during his search he found that 55-Lawrence Road was the place that he thought would suit them as their permanent residence. That was the house where Ms Kahan and her brother were born.

She narrated how in 1940, her family was arrested by the British police in India because her father and mother had Polish passports that were revoked rendering them stateless. So after being declared ‘enemy aliens’ they were transported by a train to an internment camp at Koranga near Bombay and then at another place Satra before they were released in 1946.

In the end a video clip was shown in which Ms Kahan was sitting in a dilapidated room in the house on Lawrence Road in 2007 when she visited the place for the first time, telling the audience that she had been thinking about this room that used to be her bedroom all her life.

Then Ms Kahan described how her family lived as ‘privileged outsiders’ for years and was invited to prestigious state functions including a dinner with Queen Elizabeth when she visited Pakistan, till early 1970s when Arab-Israel war broke out and they were again looked with suspicion because of their Jewish identity. After that they decided to leave Pakistan and settled in the UK.

Published in Dawn, February 23rd, 2020