Two Lives

Shanti Behari Seth was born and brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin to study medicine and dentistry. It was here that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife, as a lodger in her father's house. Henny Gerda Caro was born in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German. A friendship flowered between them, and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England, just a month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in that country: Shanti.