Authors: Stephen Benatar
“I certainly haven’t kept it up to date,” she answered, coldly. “After your reaction to it that last time, there didn’t seem much point.”
“Yet you’ve still got it?”
“I really couldn’t say. Who knows? Perhaps.”
“But where?”
“If anywhere—on top of that cupboard in your room.”
I stood up. Now, out of the four of us, only my grandmother remained seated. She looked small.
“Well, if it’s there, I’ll read it … so that we can afterwards talk a little more intelligently, maybe, about ostriches and biased journalism and other such related issues. Speaking of which,
Kristallnacht
was immensely horrible, yes—but it was
not
the wholesale slaughter of the Jews. If the report made out that it was … well, there you are then, I think I’ve proved my case.”
I didn’t think any such thing, of course, but whilst delivering this line I had managed to get as far as the door.
I shouted back: “And for heaven’s sake, Sybella, won’t somebody please do
something
about that poor frightened little dog!”
Though that, as a secondary exit line, was both unnecessary and deplorable and one for which I later on—but not a minute too soon—wholeheartedly apologized.
38
That dismally contentious report retained its pride of place: still the top one in the folder. But otherwise the clippings were in strictly chronological order.
The first lot related to the Jewish question.
For instance:
Dec 16, 1937
.
A full-scale attack on modern art—‘a decadent by-product of Bolshevik Jewish corruption’—was launched by Hitler when he opened a new art gallery, the Haus der Kunst, in Munich. A crowd of 30,000 heard him blame the decadence of German art, before the Nazis, on Jewish art dealers and critics, who promoted ‘something new at any price’.
He added: “We had Futurism, Expressionism, Realism, Cubism, even Dadaism. Could insanity go further? There were pictures with green skies and purple seas. There were paintings which could only be due to abnormal eyesight.”
Herr Hitler, himself a one-time painter of conventional street scenes, went on to threaten that people who see things in such ways should be dealt with under the programme for sterilizing the insane.
March 18, 1938
.
A pogrom, called ‘the great spring cleaning’ by the Nazi newspapers, is being carried out at great speed in Austria. Jews are being excluded from their professions, Jewish judges have been dismissed, shops have been forced to put up placards saying ‘Jewish concern’. Theatres and music halls have been ‘spring cleaned’ and among the artists Vienna will know no more are Richard Tauber and Max Reinhardt.
June 19, 1938
.
German children have been recruited for the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign. Boys of 13 and younger, armed with brushes and buckets of white paint, marched along the Frankfurterallee in a Jewish neighbourhood of east Berlin today and daubed the Star of David on shops pointed out to them by adults.
In schools, children are asked where their parents buy school clothing, and those who admit that it comes from a Jewish shop are made to stand in a corner. Playing with or even speaking to Jewish children is forbidden.
Dec 12, 1938
.
Walther Funk, a one-time financial journalist and now Economics Minister, has found a way to ban Jews from any kind of business activity (while avoiding, he claims, disruption of the German economy). Jews are forbidden to deal in property, jewellery or precious metals, or freely operate bank accounts. Any securities they own will be disposed of as the Minister judges to be in the national interest. Jewish businesses will be closed down by specially appointed executors.
January 17, 1939
.
Jews are banned from being dentists, vets, and pharmacists, also banned from driving, going to cinemas, theatres, or concerts.
But the second lot of cuttings—under a different paperclip—was concerned with resistance to the Nazis.
Non-Jewish resistance.
For instance:
Feb 10, 1938
.
Adolf Hitler has crushed opposition among the officer corps of the German army by sacking two leading generals and appointing himself Supreme Commander of the armed forces. The two army chiefs have each been smeared by sexual innuendoes. It is said that the Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg married a former prostitute and that General Werner von Fritsch is a homosexual.
March 4, 1938
.
Pastor Niemoeller, the German Confessional Church leader, was today sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for ‘re-education’. There he will join 3,000 inmates under the ‘Death’s Head’ battalion of the SS (Schutzstaffel, protection squad). The pastor, a former U-boat commander, has become a focus of resistance to Nazi ideas.
The Nazi regime has been using concentration camps during the last five years for the confinement in primitive conditions of Jews, Communists and other political suspects.
Each of these camps is under the control of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and chief of German police, and every camp is guarded by 1,500 troopers, serving in the elite SS security force.
I sat on the bed I had slept in each time I came to Acton Burnell; at least, the one I had used after outgrowing the crib which Gramps, some fifty years ago, had made for my mother, the first of his and Grandma’s children.
And I considered those reports.
Most of them were both short on detail and unsupported by a photo. Even
with
a photo the text was often unconvincing. For example, one purported to show two Nazi bureaucrats measuring a man’s nose; they suspected him of being a Jew.
If
the photograph were genuine then perhaps its most disturbing feature was the sheer ordinariness of those three individuals. They all looked perfectly pleasant, like people you might happily have chatted to on the train—the alleged persecutors as much as the alleged suspect. ‘Alleged’ being once again the operative word here, since there was obviously a much surer way of discovering whether any man were Jewish. For the purposes of this photograph, indeed, I wondered why they hadn’t chosen a female.
In any case, who were ‘they’? German propagandists? Non-German propagandists?
And why weren’t there any pictures of Pastor Niemoeller or of those two sacked army officers? I either hadn’t known about this latter pair or else had totally forgotten. Which I imagined was possible—having been only twenty at the time. And not a particularly mature twenty at that.
(I had known about Niemoeller, of course; had regarded him merely as a crank.)
But if I was making excuses for myself—‘only twenty’—did this mean I was now partly accepting what I read? (More than
partly
, perhaps; I supposed that if in fact I had read those extracts back in 1939, I might
partly
have accepted them even then.) Therefore—possibly a better way of expressing it—could this mean I was now a little less
obdurate
than before, a little less hostile, a little less in denial of a steadily encroaching idea? That the education to which I had been insidiously exposed, especially throughout my adolescent years, might always have been slightly slanted?
I wasn’t sure about ‘insidiously’.
Nor about ‘slightly’.
(And I wondered suddenly if such a belated discovery as this—or acknowledgment or whatever one might choose to call it—could actually have been crystallized in some strange fashion by Buchholz’s telling me about the admiral.)
There were other clippings in the file. A score of them.
And while I retained my concentration I read about German parents who risked having their children taken away from them if they weren’t sufficiently rigorous about instilling the precepts of Nazism.
Then I read about Hitler’s bombing of Guernica in 1937.
Guernica had been a communications centre. In addition, it had possessed an important munitions factory. But the report claimed the complete avoidance of military targets; claimed the bombs had been unloaded instead over the town’s main square and the streets surrounding this. And since it was market day, the square had been packed with country people, mostly women and children. (‘In the city, soldiers were collecting charred bodies. They were sobbing like infants. There were flames and smoke and grit, and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into the inferno. Debris was piled high. The shocked survivors all had the same story to tell: Heinkels, Junkers, incendiary bombs, machine-gun fire. “
Aviones … bombas … mucho, mucho.
”’)
After Guernica I read again about
Kristallnacht
. Perhaps the elapse of four years had altered me more than I knew. I had been equally appalled—at least equally appalled—in 1939; but in 1939 I had not felt satiated. I had still been moved by rhetoric. Had still been moved (and I realized that this was vile, I realized that this was totally contemptible) by the prospect of adventure. In 1939 I had been far readier to rationalize. (Except when I’d been arguing with my father!) And since then, too, I had actually come across people who had
boasted
of taking part in the debased proceedings of that night. No women as it happened; but I supposed it could be true that women
had
been caught up in the hysteria. Even their infants. Even their babies. I closed the file and flung it to the bottom of the bed.
But I mustn’t get depressed, I told myself. Absolutely must
not
! This present time was much too precious,
much
too precious.
And I had only twenty hours left. Less! In twenty hours from now I’d be far away from Acton Burnell; far away from Sybella. I would be standing on a beach in Anglesey … on Amlwch beach in Anglesey. Last night—while she and I had still been laughing at Sid Field and feeling integrated, insulated, safe—Heinrich’s letter had been left for me at Abbey Road. Tomorrow, at fifteen hundred hours, I had an appointment with a rowing boat.
And roughly ten minutes after that I had an appointment with a submarine.
Of course it was by submarine that—figuratively speaking—Bill Martin had been delivered to the Fatherland.
Somehow it seemed appropriate that the tracker of Bill Martin should be delivered in the same way.
39
So—quite determined that I
wasn’t
going to be depressed; that I wasn’t going to spoil what little time remained, either for myself or for anyone—I passed no comment on the clippings. Not one word. And Sybella, quick to empathize, instinctively refrained from asking me about them.
If she’d been hoping—as of course she had—that, when we all convened again, my grandmother would be equally reticent … well, in that case, she saw her hopes abundantly fulfilled. What had happened less than an hour ago might never have happened at all. Grandma came back into the sitting room carrying a tray with a bottle and four glasses.
“This important occasion calls for a toast!” was the first thing she said.
Gramps, also smiling—he, possibly, out of sheer pride at such a spectacular recovery—followed behind her holding an armful of precariously balanced logs. I jumped up and unloaded them. As I was brushing chips of bark off his cardigan, I caught Sybella’s look of unmistakable relief.
“Well, what
do
you think of her?” I cried.
“Oh, darling, not again, please!” said Sybella. “And besides … If you were bent on making such a fool of yourself you could at least have done it in the kitchen.”
“Why? Do you feel an answer in the kitchen would have been in any way different?”
“Perhaps a
degree
less constrained.”
I made no reply, not verbally, but somehow—suddenly—we were all laughing.
“Yes, that’s absolutely right,” my grandmother told her. “Eric didn’t need to pull that face. Some of us in this family have acquired a reputation for being truthful in any room in the house … I’m sure
I
don’t know why! So in the light of that, Sybella, when I say we think you’re charming and delightful you can rest assured that it’s the truth.”
“Oh,” stuttered Sybella, “thank you, that’s very kind, I—”
“You note, though, how Grandma phrased it?
When I say
. That doesn’t mean she
has
said.”
“Oh, that boy! Sybella, will you teach him, please, not to split hairs?” By now the sherry had been handed round. “Does everyone who has a second language strive to speak it quite so perfectly? How tiresome! What are they trying to prove, I wonder. Still,” she conceded, “considering he has only
two
such aggravating faults, perhaps you’ll tell me next it’s almost churlish to complain.”
Sybella said: “I’ll tell you when I’ve heard about the
other
aggravating fault.”
But it was only after she had spoken, I knew, that she would have realized the nature of the risk she had taken.
“Why, naturally, that he doesn’t listen sufficiently to his elders and betters. Or to
one
of his elders and betters, at any rate. What else could it be?” (I imagined Sybella casting around for some appropriately light-hearted response.) “But in fact there may still be grounds for hope. At least he’s made himself a choice of wife that even his grandmother couldn’t have improved upon.”
So it seemed an evening of real harmony lay ahead of us. There occurred only one short exchange that might have proved disruptive. After we’d virtually finished off the sherry between the four of us—and the bottle had been a new one—my grandmother said to me:
“Darling, do you really have to go back?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, I do.”
“But is there no way you could conceivably see yourself—just conceivably—remaining over here with your wonderful grandparents who love you, and your wonderful fiancée who loves you, and your marginally less wonderful but by no means wholly negligible aunts and uncles and cousins and things who quite naturally love you, too? Is there absolutely no possible way?”
I was arguably a little less affected by the sherry than she was.
“Grandma, no possible way in the world. If I could stay, I would—surely you know that? But there are certain ramifications. I can’t talk about them, yet they mean I don’t have any choice. Truly.”