Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  And the music continued, as it did in families all over Europe, even, as we now know, on the threshold of death in the camps. Win played the first violin for the Newbury Orchestra, performing in schools, church halls, army camps, and other public venues. Music, she writes on April 12, “is the only thing in life that makes me forget everything, and so at the moment it is a great relief of mental strain.”

  The relief is temporary. She cannot bear the uncertainty about Bernard. On April 18:

  I do everything quite normally but quite mechanically. Inside I am quite dead except for the constant gnawing anxiety. It is like permanently waiting in the waiting room while someone you love is having an operation—only there is no one now to pop in and out and report progress. I wish that my life could have been more balanced—that I could ever have cared for the children half as much as I care for you. But I have always been entirely wrapped up in you; at your side I could face any hardship, any privation, any sorrow, because I love you with my whole being. Without you I am an empty husk, without soul or spirit or joy.

  When I first read this, I was slightly startled, but not because her words revealed anything I wasn’t aware of; they are an honest and touching manifestation of her love. But the letter is alarming too, for it expresses so clearly the dependency that goes with total devotion. And it brought back to mind those feelings voiced by her eldest son, in 1933: “John thinks it foolish of me to miss you, as he could quite well be my husband for once!”

  I have no doubt that Win’s most acute anxiety in April 1940 concerned Bernard’s fate. But there was another fear, so far unspoken, in the letters, and above all to her children. When she wrote in 1934 of her dread of what might happen to the family, she might have meant socialism, as propagated in J. B. Priestley’s book. Bolshevism certainly worried her, even after the war with Nazi Germany had begun. When Hitler made a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, she noted that “Russia and Germany seem so cock-a-hoop and so closely united. Will Bolshevism be the next menace? Shall we or our children have to fight next against the attempted domination of the world by the Bolshevists?”

  But she knew perfectly well that there was a far greater imminent menace, too awful to dwell upon, and that was the fate of the family in case of a successful German invasion. That she didn’t voice her fear openly for a long time probably had to do with her stoicism, that “British manner” she was so proud of. Speculating on a German victory would have smacked of defeatism. And she made it quite clear later on what she thought of that. Defeatism was for foreigners, or, as Win called them in her letters, “foreign bohunks.”* And this included some of the adult refugees she herself had helped to save.

  The Sterns, for example, now living in the house on Templewood Avenue. After receiving a letter from Maria Stern, Win observes, on July 1, 1940, “I am afraid they have allowed themselves to get very bitter. Ernst was never de-Germanised and Hans [Stern] not much better, and I think that they might really do some harm to the cause unwittingly, by their extremely defeatist attitude.”

  On July 19, she returns to the same theme: “Mother is somewhat depressed, having consorted with the b—— refugees,* who are nearly all bitter and defeatist. Maria and Hans particularly are forgetting anything good they ever had in this country and are full of bitter criticism, dragging up every discreditable rumour they can against the British . . . I wish the whole lot could be carted back to their beloved fatherland.”

  There were exceptions, of course. Reinhard Alsberg, her young cousin in Walter’s charge, had changed his name in 1937 to Ashley Raeburn. His attitude, Win writes with intense approval, was quite different from that of the b—— refugees. So imagine his shock, and hers too, when he was in danger of being arrested and sent to a camp for “enemy aliens.” This happened to a large number of German Jews who had just managed to escape from Nazi persecution, only to be suspected of forming an alien fifth column in the country that offered them refuge. On July 1, Win writes, “[Ashley] said that until now he had quite forgotten that he was ever German and that he knows only one loyalty—to England—so naturally he is cut to the quick.” In fact, he had a narrow escape. A friendly policeman told Walter to make sure Ashley was out of the house during the day. Later, he was able to join the Pioneer Corps, made up mostly of trusted Jewish refugees, and after that the British army.

  This question of loyalty was of cardinal importance to Win. More than during the first war, when the anti-German mood in Britain was actually fiercer, she felt the need to prove her loyalty, to make it clear that she was not like those defeatist refugees, those foreign bohunks who refused to be de-Germanized. Or like her neighbors in Kintbury, the Padels (“Ma and Pa-del,” as they were known), with whom she made up a quartet to play chamber music, or another neighbor named Mrs. Rowse, who were full of defeatism and, in Win’s eyes, Communist sympathies. When Win hears that Bernard has been spared from the worst battles around Narvik, she is relieved, of course, but still writes to him on May 8:

  I do hope that our Norwegian campaign was not just an expensive gesture, with no real determination in it. Next to you I love England more than anything else in the world . . . I want you to come home soon so desperately, but England’s honour would be too high a price to pay for my personal happiness. I wish they would hurry up & organise all of us & utilise all of you, so that we could see this thing through as quickly as possible & prove to the world that England is still on top & will be browbeaten & threatened by nobody.

  There is a tone to these letters that was lacking in her correspondence during World War I, when she boasted of being a “lead-swinger” trying to keep her patients at Beech House from being sent back to the front. Patriotism and anxiety not to be seen as a refugee might be part of this. More urgent, perhaps, was the entirely rational notion that Nazi Germany had to be defeated, not just for the honor of England but for her own as well as the family’s survival.

  There is no direct answer to Win’s fighting words in Bernard’s letters from Norway, but his sentiments were doubtless the same. On May 23, Bernard writes, “Pretty drastic decrees in England were given last night on the wireless—a sort of martial law but in the hands of parliament, it seems. I wonder how it will affect you & our belongings, but I believe it’s the right step & will bring home to everyone that there is a life & death struggle going on.”

  Like Win, he was probably thinking of England. But by the end of May, when the German Blitzkrieg had already conquered Poland, Holland, and Belgium, was storming through France and poised to cross the Channel toward England, the unspoken fear became stronger than the fear of appearing defeatist.

  On May 22, Win writes:

  Bun, my dear love—To-day’s letter must be a very serious one, although I hate to worry you, but I must ask your wise advice & rely as always upon your excellent judgment and foresight . . . I expect you do hear news from this side of the world & you know in what a very precarious position we all are. If the worst happened, & this country came under Nazi domination, which Heaven forefend, it would obviously be impossible for us as a Jewish family to go on living here. What am I to do with our children in such a fearful event? I know that this may seem unduly pessimistic, & it is I hope a remote, if not an impossible contingency, but you always look far ahead & prepare for eventualities . . . Can you suggest any plan of action & one in which you could participate? I could not face the possibility of having to transfer the children somewhere without being able to get in touch with you, so that you knew where we were & could join us there.

  Bernard replies, “I have thought much over that one letter you wrote wondering what to do in the worst event. For the moment I should stay put. I still think we shall pull through in the end, but more about this when I see you.”

  Win was naturally worried about what would happen to her children. But what terrified her more than anything else was the kind of fate suffered by the parents whose children she had rescued from Berlin
. They too were patriotic citizens of their country. Some of the men had Iron Crosses from the first war to prove it. And suddenly their beloved country, the nation of Beethoven, Schiller, and Goethe, but also of Mendelssohn (Felix and Moses) and Albert Einstein, had betrayed them. The humiliation of having everything you held dear ripped away from you, bit by bit, was more than Win could have borne. Becoming a refugee, to her, was a destiny worse than death.

  LEFT TO RIGHT: Hilary, John, Win, Susan, Wendy, and Roger

  One man who understood this perfectly was Bernard’s closest friend, Basil William Sholto Mackenzie, who succeeded his father in 1942 as the 2nd Baron Amulree. “Uncle Sholto,” as he was known to my mother’s generation, was a quiet homosexual medical doctor with a stammer. I saw him last in the late 1970s, when he showed me around in the House of Lords where he had been a Liberal peer and party whip for almost twenty years. This most discreet of gentlemen, always impeccably dressed and diffident in manner, had a long love affair in the 1940s with the art collector Douglas Cooper, a man known for his affected voice trilling in a variety of accents depending on his mood, his loud suits, and his generally outrageous behavior. But Basil, as most of his nonmedical friends called him, apparently enjoyed the flamboyance of his partner vicariously, chuckling quietly at pranks he himself would never have thought of getting up to. That Bernard and Win were perfectly well aware of Cooper’s presence in Sholto’s life is clear from several letters in which they cannot quite conceal a hint of rivalry. Bernard refers to Cooper several times as a bit of a “pansy.” On May 2, Win mentions inviting Sholto down for the weekend at Mount Pleasant but complains that “the old skunk has never let one squeak out of himself since you left, although he is supposed to take such an interest in the family. I suppose the famous Douglas must be somewhere in the offing.”

  In any case, Sholto pops up again in a more favorable light in a letter written on May 26. It was the Day of National Prayer, for which the king had rallied the nation. Win went straight from Paddington station to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St. John’s Wood, where she was moved to hear Rabbi Mattuck fighting back his tears as he told a packed hall that Britain would prevail, even if the odds looked overwhelming for the time being. Win writes, “After the service I went straight to Sholto’s . . . After tea [he] walked me through the Park towards Paddington, and I came home feeling better. The irises in the Park are looking magnificent, and my dear old London is looking far too beautiful and dignified to dare to think of its destruction. On one point Sholto reassured me. He said I might be dead, but I should never be a refugee, and for that I was truly thankful.”

  It was the kindest thing he could possibly have said to her, and just the reassurance Win needed. Having established that she would never be a refugee, she could now concentrate on the future of her children, while demonstrating again and again her unquestioning identification with England. The retreat from Dunkirk, for example, in the last days of May 1940, when more than three hundred thousand soldiers were evacuated under heavy German fire by an improvised flotilla of naval ships, civilian motor launches, sailing boats, and even rowboats, sent Win into renewed flights of patriotic sentiment. She appeared to have completely forgotten that her own parents were born in Germany.

  May 31, 1940:

  My darling—What a brilliant historic retreat our B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force] have made from the very jaws of death. I keep thinking of the Charge of the Light Brigade. What terrific reverses we always have in every century, & what undaunted courage and tenacity is shown by our men in every generation. It makes you prouder and prouder to be British.

  Bernard’s prose around that time is a little more down-to-earth. He mentions a letter from Sholto, who had visited Douglas Cooper in Paris, declaring that the city looked unchanged and the food was as good as ever. “I fear,” writes Bernard on May 25, “he would not find the same now with the grim struggle going on over there. We all feel we are rather a sideshow.” Typically, Bernard would no doubt rather have been in the action with the BEF at Dunkirk. But he concludes, “I prefer not to think on war but on you all summer, as you describe yourself, casting the years off with your winter clothes. If only I could have just one peep at you again.”

  Win, however, continues in her patriotic vein. On June 3:

  What an amazing feat that evacuation was, but how terrible for the unfortunate remnant who were left behind. I am sure they will die to the last man rather than surrender. The men who have come back simply can’t describe the hell it is over there, & yet they are all keen to go back and finish Hitler off . . . I feel that the spirit of all our fighting men is really undefeatable, and whatever we have to go through first, we must eventually come out on top.

  There was another source of worry, however, expressed in a letter sent on May 26, about a fifth column in the environs of Kintbury. A master of the local school had been interrogated on suspicion of treasonous activities. He was released in the end, and the old man was in a state of shock. But since Win abhorred his leftist views, she had limited sympathy and concluded that he “richly deserved a shaking up.” Laura, who kept up with all the village gossip, told Win that there was a whole “hornet’s nest” in the area, held under close observation. Luckily, the wife of the main local landowner, who was “very true blue British,” knew that Win was beyond any suspicion. Win still wondered whether she should continue to send her youngest children to a school harboring “political suspects.”

  I have no letter to show what Bernard made of all this. But I know that he seriously considered sending the children to Canada. There is a mention in Win’s letter on June 25 of an official interview with the children in Reading, the largest town in the county. The reason for the interview is not stated. But the most probably Canadian official “asked them when they were sailing & under whose care—hoped they would enjoy Canada & come back with a rich Canadian accent. So the cat was out of the bag then.”

  Quite what happened after that is uncertain. Later letters show that there was some kind of meeting in Cambridge, where the issue was resolved. Here is Bernard, writing from India on June 22, 1943: “Darling, how often do I recall that fateful visit we paid to Cambridge, our indecision & your final advice to keep the family in England with us. That, sweetheart, was perhaps one of the greatest flashes of wisdom that you have brought into our joint affairs & they have been many.”

  This meeting must have taken place sometime in the summer of 1940, before the Battle of Britain had entered its final phase. For on September 23, Win writes, “Isn’t the latest German atrocity appalling, & aren’t you glad that we kept ours here, even admitting the dangers in this country.”

  Quite what kind of atrocity she was alluding to isn’t certain either from Win’s letters or Bernard’s. That the Blitz on London began on September 7 cannot have been a reason to rejoice in keeping the family in England. My guess is that it concerned the sinking of a British convoy in the Atlantic: on September 18 a German U-boat sank a British steamer named City of Benares. Of the 191 passengers, 134 perished. Many of them were children being evacuated to Canada.

  —

  Sholto was not the only friend who played a vital role in both Bernard’s and Win’s lives. Ben Wevill, the surgeon whom Bernard had met in Norway, became a close friend and often played chamber music with Win. Then there was a doctor named Gifford. Bernard had a gift for friendship, especially with men who used to be called “confirmed bachelors.” Bernard’s army friend from World War I, Harry, once wrote to Win that if he had been a girl, he would surely have fallen in love with Bernard.

  On February 23, 1943, Bernard comments on their particular friendships: “Gifford was with you when you wrote. Have you seen him since? When I return we must have a party early with our two faithful bachelor family friends. I don’t think either of them will marry now.”

  That he doesn’t mention Ben Wevill, along with Sholto and Gifford, is puzzling. But this may be because Ben was
possibly closer at times to Win than to Bernard, a situation that had caused a rare friction between them. In another letter from India, reflecting on their bachelor friends, Bernard suggests that these presumably lonely men found in the Schlesinger household a kind of surrogate family to make up for a lack of their own.

  Somewhat more smugly, in yet another letter from India, this one sent on October 27, 1942, he writes that the “final proof of a really successful married home is a faithful bachelor friend & we have two such people which is as it should be & proves that our marriage has been twice as successful as that of anybody else.”

  Well, all this may have been true. But there might have been something else that explains these friendships, as dear to Win as they were to Bernard. Although this is never spelled out, Ben Wevill was almost certainly gay. In his long wartime letters to Win, mostly from Edinburgh, where he lived with his mother, Ben writes about his love of flowers, ballet, music, and his young “protégé” named James, who goes on holidays with him when he is on leave from the army.

  Ben, Sholto, and Gifford were all Scottish. Bernard made one other lifelong friend in the army, a married man this time, who was from Belfast. There appears to be a pattern here, which I recognize. Despite Bernard and Win’s devoted Englishness, their closest friends were from the periphery, as it were. One might even say that they were fellow outsiders of a sort, or, to be more precise, people who, much like Bernard and Win, came to the inside from a distinct angle. Bernard often remarks in his wartime letters how well he usually gets on with “R.C.s,” or Roman Catholics. My aunt Hilary, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, once told me that he felt a special affinity with her faith. More likely, he felt an affinity with R.C.s because, with the exception of some old aristocratic families, they were never quite in the English mainstream, and indeed themselves had been subject to negative discrimination.