Käfer (right) with Peter and Bibi, circa 1940
While One Boy’s War is fiction, it is inspired by real people and actual historical events that took place in the U.K. during the summer of 1940.
Two years earlier, Käfer and his family had been living what appeared to be a privileged life in Berlin. Käfer’s father, Rifat, was a successful aeronautical engineer and the director of one of Germany’s largest aeroplane-parts firms. Among Rifat’s many inventions and patents was an electrical fuel pump that was on the list of the German Air Force’s secret weapons. He took the patent with him to England, and the pump was used in both Spitfire and Messerschmitt fighters by the end of the Second World War.
But Rifat and his wife Else had a secret. They were both Jews, a heritage they hid from their children to try and keep them safe. In 1935, they were all stripped of their German citizenship. In April 1938, they fled Berlin with virtually nothing and began a perilous flight from the Nazis, heading first to the Netherlands, where Rifat set up his own aeroplane-parts manufacturing firm and provided information to the British about German aircraft and parts development and production. On May 14, 1940, the family escaped by fishing boat to England as bombs rained down on Rotterdam. When Käfer later recalled that day, he mistakenly thought they had left in the night because the sky was so black from the smoke.
Eight months later, Käfer, Mama, Bibi, and Peter sailed to Canada on the SS Warwick Castle. Rifat had gone ahead on the SS Nerissa. While both ships made it safely to Canada, months later they were torpedoed by U-boats and sunk. All told, 300 passengers and crew were drowned at sea; 457 survived.
For dramatic purposes, I have placed Käfer, Mama, Bibi, and Peter on a fictional liner, the SS Somerville, standing in for an actual liner, the SS Volendam, and I have moved its sail date forward by a month. The SS Volendam was the first ship to take part in an ill-fated programme to remove British children from harm’s way during the summer of 1940, as German forces gathered across the English Channel in preparation for an invasion. There were 321 children among the 600 passengers on board the SS Volendam when it left Liverpool on August 29, 1940. The following night, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat. All of the passengers were successfully evacuated and rescued by other ships in the convoy, a feat that was attributed, in part, to the many drills everyone was put through prior to the attack. The only casualty was the ship’s Dutch purser, who was hit in the head by a swinging pulley and knocked into the sea where he drowned.
By all accounts, the children’s response to their ordeal was remarkable. An article in the Gourock Times, published September 6, 1940, stated, “The behaviour of the children is described by all concerned as having been wonderful. They showed no sign of panic or fear.” The chairman of the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, Geoffrey Shakespeare, told the newspaper, “I have been with the children after they landed. Some of them were feeling a little sea-sick, but they are all in great spirits. They are marvellous. They sang in the boats in the rough sea.”
Sadly, some of those same children met a far different fate less than three weeks later when the ship they were on, the SS City of Benares, was torpedoed and sunk, effectively bringing the evacuation programme to a close.
The Avigdors remained in England for eight months, staying at the Selsdon Park Hotel near Croydon. Käfer well remembered the Blitzkrieg that began in September 1940, driving him—and everyone else in the hotel—down to the air-raid shelter, night after night. For dramatic purposes, I have relocated them to Claridge’s in London.
While both George Wolfe and David are fictitious characters, there was a network of German spies living in England during the Second World War. And Security Service files released in February 2014 reveal there were also “scores” of Nazi-sympathizing Britons, who were willing to betray their country.
Rifat’s name was one of the 2,820 in Hitler’s “Black Book,” Sonderfahndungsliste GB, a most wanted list, which was to be used immediately after a successful invasion. The list was published in England for the first time in September 2015. Compiled by SS General Walter Schellenberg’s office, it contained the names of politicians, intelligence agents, writers, scientists, businessmen, artists—and everyone who had already escaped the Nazis. Käfer died in February 2015 and never knew this about his father, so in my novel, his finding the list in Mr. Wolfe’s safe and his reaction to it and to his parent’s true heritage is complete fiction, but I thought it would be interesting to explore how he might have felt had he discovered it at the time. It’s not clear whether Rifat actually knew about the “secret” list. But twenty thousand copies of it were printed in Germany, and from Rifat’s letters to the British under-secretary of state for the Home Office, he was clearly concerned at the prospect of the Gestapo finding him and the family in England.
On August 15, 1940, the Croydon Aerodrome, which was a Royal Air Force base, was badly bombed and damaged in the first major air raid by the Luftwaffe on London. Korect Depth Gauge Co. Ltd., which was manufacturing Rifat’s fuel pump, escaped damage.
Five days later, at the height of the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. To the best of my knowledge, Käfer and his family were in Croydon at the time—not in the House of Commons—although I am certain they would have heard the speech broadcast on the wireless. Mr. Churchill’s “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech was one of many stirring addresses he delivered during the course of the Second World War. The former prime minister wrote all of his own speeches, and they were critical in stiffening the resolve of the British public.
And lest any reader think it far-fetched for Käfer to encounter Churchill at Claridge’s, it was well known that the Mayfair hotel was a favourite dining spot of the prime minister’s, for business as well as pleasure.
Aunt Charlotte was the only family member of her generation on either side of Käfer’s family who did not survive the war. She was transported to the Warsaw Ghetto on April 14, 1942, and murdered. In 2013, Charlotte’s life was commemorated when a Stolpersteine was laid at Emser Str. 15 in Wilmersdorf, Berlin, the last place she lived voluntarily.
When the Avigdors moved to Toronto in January 1941, Käfer and Peter were enrolled at Upper Canada College. Their student registration cards listed them as Protestant. Käfer didn’t discover his Jewish heritage until he was fifty years old.