The Bravest Voices

by Ida Cook

  Someone who had known the family well in better days told us that they had been the happiest family imaginable. They never had a great deal of money, but enough. They had always said they would not part with any one of their children for a million marks.

  When we came into the case, we were simply asked to see the woman, hear her story and find out what could be done, if anything. We asked her to come and meet us at the apartment of some Jewish friends of ours. She came in, clutching her little girl by the hand. She said no word of greeting. She simply broke into desperate, economical speech.

  “I can’t part with my little girl,” she said almost fiercely. “She is too young. But my little boys you may take, for they are absolutely starving.”

  We spoke to her as gently as possible and asked her to sit down and tell us something of the circumstances. We really knew most of the sad story already, but she went over it again, while Louise and I considered what we could do.

  At the end, I told her quite frankly it was unlikely that we should be able to get the children together in one home, but I promised to try to get all the boys in one village or town. I was already turning over in my mind the possibility of interesting one of the Northumbrian villages near our own old home.

  “When your husband is better,” I continued—though I’m afraid I really meant when he is dead—“we will try to get you over on a domestic permit, some place where you can bring the little girl, too. It isn’t much to offer immediately, but we will try to reunite you somewhere, some day.”

  She was faintly comforted, poor soul. But it was all rather long-term planning. Most immediately important, we were able to leave her a fair amount of money, because a friend who was emigrating had a little left that he could not take with him. In the course of the conversation, we mentioned that we were going to the hospital in the Gagernstrasse that afternoon, and her face brightened at once.

  “My husband is there,” she said. “Would you go and see him?”

  We said that, if she thought it would comfort him to hear that we were going to try to help, we would certainly go. And she arranged to meet us there.

  It was a strange and terrible experience—unshared, I think, by any other, or by very few other British people. Every case in that hospital was a concentration-camp case; that is to say, every patient had been made ill deliberately. Only two surgeons had been allowed to remain to look after the unfortunates. Of these, one had a septic thumb at the time and could not operate.

  The other was quite a young man who took us into his private office and said, “I want you to give me your advice about something.”

  We promised to do our best.

  “I have a chance to escape,” he explained quietly. “All my papers are in order for me to go to America. Have I the right to take this chance, or should I stay here with these people?”

  Louise and I looked at each other in horrified silence. Then at last I replied, “I’m terribly sorry, but we couldn’t possibly undertake to decide such a thing for anyone. It is for you to make your own decision.”

  We heard afterwards that he had stayed.

  We were taken upstairs to the poor fellow we were to visit. At the top of the staircase, the wife and three thin, bright little boys were waiting. They beamed silently upon us and seemed unnaturally good. Presently, we and the woman went into the small ward her husband shared with two or three others.

  It seemed to us that he was obviously dying, and though fairly interested in our assurances that we would do what we could for his children, he appeared to have passed beyond any expression of deep emotion.

  The friend who had brought us in—he had once been the chairman of the hospital—spoke to him kindly and asked if he had been in Dachau.

  The patient nodded, and our friend remarked, “I was in Buchenwald. They said it was even worse there.”

  “Yes.” The sick man nodded slightly again. “It was worse in Buchenwald. The man in the opposite bed was in Buchenwald. They took him out of the room while they brought you in.”

  There seemed to be little else one could say. We repeated our promises to do what we could, and then we left.

  If anyone had told me when I was a girl at school that one day I should know what it was like to want to murder, I should, of course, have dismissed the idea as melodramatic and absurd. But as we stepped out once more into the August sunshine of the Gagernstrasse, I felt a fervent and personal desire to have a hand in killing those responsible for what we had left behind us. Naturally, the feeling fades gradually if one has no terrible and personal stake in the game. That is inevitable with civilized people. But I do know, though I cannot recapture the feeling now, that I did once think enthusiastically in terms of murder.

  We returned to England the next day. The war came about a fortnight later. During the war, we often wondered what happened to the little boys and the sister who was too young even to try to escape. We asked ourselves—did they die on the way to Poland? Were they stifled in the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Or did they die of hunger when our money gave out?

  It seemed quite beyond the realm of possibility that we should ever know the answer. And yet, some time after the war, when I first began to write and lecture about our experiences, someone wrote to us, saying: “I think you might like to know what happened to the family you contacted on your last visit and whom you obviously mourned as dead. Contrary to all possible expectation, they survived. The war came so quickly that able-bodied workers were immediately in demand. So the woman was able to get work. To a certain extent, her husband grew somewhat better. And somehow, throughout the war, she managed to support them all.”

  Our correspondent did not say if the man went into hiding, but I imagine he must somehow have done so. Anyway, at the end of the war, they were among the first families who emigrated to South America, where they started a new life.

  Characteristically, our last contact with Germany was strangely melodramatic. On August 24—I remember because it was my birthday—news was received that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact had been signed, and even the most naïve could not pretend to themselves any longer that war was avoidable.

  It had been a curious and nerve-racking day. Just as we were going to bed, around midnight, the telephone rang. I answered it and was informed by an obviously harassed operator that there was a call coming through for me from Germany. Would I wait a few minutes?

  As I waited, I realized that, in the hurry and muddle of the moment, my line had not been isolated. From every side, there rushed in upon me voices speaking in a variety of languages. They all sounded agitated, of course, and simply registered as a jumble of sound.

  It was as though I were listening in to a mad and terrified Europe. In the silence of our hall, I seemed to be on an island, listening to the cries of those who were about to be engulfed. I was completely helpless. Soon, I too was to be swept into at least the outer currents of the swell. In just over a year, the very ceiling above my head was to crash down under the attack of the German bombers. But for the moment, I was simply “listening in” to what was coming. I have never forgotten those dramatic few minutes.

  At last my line was cleared. The voice of a friend in Frankfurt came through, with a final request for help for someone, which she and I both knew must be too late. Then we said goodbye, and added, “for a long time.”

  I rang off. Our refugee work was over.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It seemed odd to say that one’s first impression of a war could be boredom and release from tension, but that was exactly the case with us. For years, Louise and I had been living amid melodrama and urgency. And, quite suddenly, there was nothing else that we could do. The horizons had shrunk to the limits of ordinary life, except insofar as “ordinary life” included those rearrangements and readjustments necessary in every family, now that war had actually come.

  Jim, the youngest of the family, ha
d been a Territorial Army soldier for several years, and he joined the army the day war broke out. And Dad, now seventy-five, informed the family that he intended to be a stretcher-bearer. This greatly annoyed Mother, who was severely practical. With the candour for which she was justly celebrated in the home circle, she said, “If you try to do anything like that, you’re more likely to end up on the stretcher rather than at the end of it.”

  This statement was accepted in such complete silence that Louise and I wondered if Dad’s feelings were hurt. We made it clear that we respected Dad’s intentions, while agreeing with Mother’s practical outlook. One of us said, “We think it is fine of you to want to be a stretcher-bearer, Dad, even if Mother thinks it’s impractical.”

  Dad looked mildly and amiably astonished and replied, “I don’t care in the least what any of you think, so long as I do what I think is right.” Then he went off to the enlisting offices of the Home Defence Service and volunteered as a stretcher-bearer, in the event of air raids.

  Instead, they finally accepted him as a full-time air-raid warden. He served throughout the war, though he was nearly eighty when hostilities ceased. And very marvellous he was, too. Several people from the same air-raid post told me that, during the Great Blitz, he was one of the best and most reliable wardens they had. Not even the worst raid ever seemed to rattle him.

  To me, the significance of the war years is not so much what they contained for us as what they left out. Because virtually all connections with the outside world were broken, everything that was of overwhelming personal interest to us ceased. Those years represent a sort of gap in the essential line. Opera and adventure, intertwined so inextricably for years, both ceased. The cord had suddenly snapped.

  One might have supposed that, in this sudden release from conflicting interests, I should have found it easier to devote myself to writing. On the contrary, never before had I found it so difficult to write. I had more time; I was undisturbed by hurried journeys to and from the Continent; my correspondence had dropped to one tenth of its previous bulk. And yet I found writing a genuine effort.

  I think the sudden severing of those tremendously human ties had left me dry of inspiration. Not that I ever wrote of our experiences in my novels—far from it. But when you are very close to people and seeing life in terms of big, simple essentials, your top spins and your perceptions are immensely quickened.

  During the first year of the war, Louise and I were separated. Her office was evacuated to some remote spot in Wales, and our contact was limited to the odd weekends I could spend with her or she could spend at home. We loathed it, both feeling that bombing was preferable to evacuation any day. When she finally managed to get a transfer back to a London office in September, 1941, we felt that the two worst years of the war were over.

  The brightest spot in that first boring, horrid, frustrating year was Jim’s marriage. Ena is the sort of sister-in-law for whom everyone longs and, I suppose, few deserve. We hope we are among the few deserving, for we do most certainly appreciate her. With our other sister-in-law, Bill’s wife, Lydia, we have been equally fortunate. In fact, we always tell our brothers that if we had chosen the girls ourselves, we could not have done better.

  On the occasion of the first great air raid on London in September, 1940, Louise had chosen to make one of her hurried weekend visits to us. Nesta and Jane, still our constant companions and good supporters in all our hopes and undertakings, came over to see us that evening. And, in the interval between two air-raid warnings, Louise arrived.

  We all realized that the principal activity was in the east. Looking out of our top windows, we could see an occasional midge-like cloud of fighters go up to the attack.

  Presently, we notice what seemed to be huge, slowly moving clouds massing in the eastern part of the sky. Then, as darkness fell, we noticed a curious red reflection thrown upon these clouds. And, with a sense of incredulous shock, we realized that the “clouds” were made up of thick, slowly billowing smoke rising from the burning docks.

  It is an indescribably strange moment when you see your own city on fire. You can read of the same fate befalling other cities and be horrified. You can visualize the thing happening to places you have visited and known and possibly loved. But when your own place starts to burn, there comes a sensation that is entirely new and incredible.

  Similarly, you may have seen house after house come down in raids, and you may have helped sweep up the remains of friends’ belongings, thinking you share their feelings. But when you suddenly see your own dining-room ceiling lying about in jagged lumps, you know you’ve never quite understood disaster—in the material sense—until that moment.

  Well, as everyone who was in London then will remember, it was a strange and oddly exciting night. We were frightened, of course, but the sheer sensationalism of the whole thing kept up one’s spirits. It was much later, when night after night of the same thing turned into a sort of grisly boredom, that we found it much more trying.

  Nesta and Jane stayed the night with us. When the “All Clear” sounded about six o’clock, they said they must start for home at once. Louise and I walked them part of the way. And as we came through Battersea we saw, for the first time, a collapsed and crumbling building that had been hit by a bomb.

  It was one more strange “first impression” of what was to become commonplace in the following weeks.

  Sunday was a beautiful day, but Louise had to go away again in the evening. Once more, as the light faded, we realized that the eastern sky was still red. The docks were still burning. Even the least experienced of us understood that they must make a perfect target for any planes returning that evening.

  The planes did return—that night and for an incredible number of nights to come.

  On September 13, we received our first hit.

  That is to say, a smallish bomb exploded in the garden of a house opposite. Most of our windows blew in, part of our roof came off and our hall ceiling came down. But no one was hurt. And in the grey chilly dawn, we all went out and swept up the mess. It is strange to hear the clink of your own windows and the crackle of your own roof slates as you sweep them into the gutter. But oh, how soon you grow used to that, too!

  A week later, a good deal of our local railway station was blown away, and we decided it was time Mother left London. Louise was still evacuated at this time; Jim was “somewhere in England,” waiting for daily expected orders to go overseas; Bill, while waiting to be called up, had been evacuated with his office to Devonshire. He came to London that weekend and fetched Mother back with him to Devonshire, and there she stayed for nearly a year and a half.

  That left Dad and me to hold the fort. There is no one companion I would sooner have had during those extraordinary days and nights. It was really quite difficult to be panic-stricken with Dad around.

  A week later, we were hit again. This time, I heard the damned thing coming and had time to bolt under the kitchen table. While I was trying to decide if it was wiser to hold up the table and receive any impact of falling ceiling or just to crouch there and let everything cave in, I heard a tearing sound, and then something hit the ground like a giant mallet. All our front windows blew in and our back windows blew out once more.

  But the moment was over, and I crawled out, feeling rather as one does after a bilious attack. Being bombed is quite a bit like that. The long and half-hopeful, half-gloomy anticipation precedes that dreadful moment when you know it is going to happen after all and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then comes the general upheaval—in every sense of the phrase—and finally the lovely, weak, thankful feeling: well, at least that’s over!

  About this time, I decided that, with Mother away and Dad often on night duty, there was no reason why I should not volunteer for some night duty in one of the East End shelters. Workers were badly needed, and I was freer than most. So off I went to make enquiries. In next to no time, I was
sent to one of the big shelters in Bermondsey.

  Here, I found again that tremendously close and simple contact with people I had missed so much when the refugee work ended. The story of our shelter differed little from the stories of hundreds of similar London shelters during that winter of 1940-41. But for that very reason, it is perhaps worth the telling.

  I had been asked if I would do “night-watching,” and feeling that this was about my mental level in these days, I agreed with alacrity. I was assigned to one of the really “swell” shelters that stood somewhere between Tower Bridge and the Elephant and Castle, near that quarter endeared to us all by a thousand music-hall jokes—the Old Kent Road.

  In the hurricane of fire that had been battering London, this shelter had come to be—in the very real sense of the hymn—“a shelter from the stormy blast.” Sometimes it seemed likely to become “our eternal home.”

  Remote though those times appear now, they seemed endless while we lived them. The days were little more than uneasy, work-paced intervals between the “All Clear” and the siren’s wail; the nights an ever-recurring test of endurance. The Battle of the Blitz was fought out—in the air, on the ground and, with grim determination, beneath the ground.

  * * *

  The sirens had sounded and the guns were just starting up when I felt my way down the flight of stone steps to our shelter for the first time. A smell compounded of cement, disinfectant, Oxo, people and sawdust rose to meet me. And the sound of many voices made a cheerful and determined conquest over the rumble of distant gunfire.

  People were already making up beds, exchanging greetings and sharing suppers. I stood about for a minute or two, feeling quite superfluous as a night-watcher, whatever that might be, in this busy and extraordinarily cheerful throng.

  I decided to go to the sick bay to see if there were anyone with whom I could talk.