Ellen was born in 1922 in Bad Homburg in Germany. She was forced to leave at the 11th hour in 1939 and via England, found refuge in Northern Rhodesia in 1940 where she joined her father and brother who had escaped earlier. She married a remarkably creative polymath David Chudy and they moved to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1947. They lived there till his death in 1967 and hers in 1994.

Apart from the horrors of the latter part of her youth with the onset of WW2, she was blessed with what ‘in the telling’ was an innocent and almost fairytale childhood. And she made up for her misfortunes in her later years. Her life was a rich tapestry of adventure in terms of travel, culture and mutual achievement. Over the years she was regarded by many on a one to one basis as a beacon of wisdom and hope – and as an example of someone whose humanness prevailed above all. And yet she would be the first to declare that she was unremarkable as an individual, had no special formula or answers for anything – regarding her self as below average intellectually and skills wise – and that she was as cowardly, weak and fallible as almost all of the many troubled people she had met in her wide ranging life.

Once in a while individuals are catalysts are we get a whiff of some kind of magic but cannot properly identify a source. Maybe some of this hard-to-pin-down-vibe was as real at the time as it is remembered – and avails itself to be transferred to us now beyond her mortal life. She gave us a sporting chance to remodel and ponder it, through her diaries and writing. Some of this was collated into the book  EARLY MEMORIES 1922-1952 by her daughter Naomi and some is via scraps memories and anecdotes which perhaps will make their way onto this site.

There are many perks to contemporary life but ‘having a life’ becomes less and less achievable as are drawn as moths to a flame to other things. We call it a tool but we become slaves or at least twenty-four-seven-on-call-service-agents to our technology. Certainly Ellen enjoyed her share of modernity and there were ‘bells and whistles’ to Ellen’s life beyond a dusk-to-dawn-survival-grind or the harsh purity of a monastic contemplative regime – in search of that elusive thing we call soul – but at the end of the day she stands out as a pretty good and rare example of one of those people who – on the one hand was not really that special but who ‘really did have a life’..