Personal Life
Salka Viertel was married to Berthold Viertel and they had three sons, one of whom, Peter Viertel, born in 1920 and an accomplished writer and screenwriter, was married to actress Deborah Kerr from 1960 until her death in 2007. The Viertels, members of the Jewish-German intelligentsia, moved to the United States in 1928 for a planned four year stay.
In 1932, due to Hitler's rise, they decided to stay in Santa Monica, California, where Peter grew up with his brothers, Hans and Thomas. The home in Santa Monica Canyon was the site of salons and meetings of the Hollywood intelligentsia and the émigré community of European intellectuals, particularly at the Sunday night tea parties. Salka Viertel was also active aiding those still trapped in Europe. She wrote a memoir The Kindness of Strangers.
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“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To ‘see the light’ too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
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