Life’s a Scream

My parents were on their way from Nazi Germany to England via Poland when I decided to arrive. Grimly my mother tried to hold me off but when the train pulled in to Częstochowa station I was on my way out. My father managed to find someone who contacted a doctor and my mother was made more or less comfortable in a little room at the rear of the station. It was only just in time. I had already made my way into the world virtually unaided when the midwife arrived. I have a picture of smiling faces hovering above me and in the distance through the driving snow the sound of a train whistle welcoming me into the world.

My father was a true-blue Prussian, a scientist and reluctant officer in the cavalry during the Great War. A man who knew how to live well. He was born in 1870 in Potsdam, although his family came from Torbetzkoy in the province of Kaluga, not far from Moscow, where they owned land until the Bolshevik revolution. The family was proud of its connection to the great Russian General Mikhail Larinovich Kutuzov, Prince of Smolensk, who stuck it to Napoleon pretty conclusively when he had designs on taking over Russia.

My father was my hero. He’d been educated at Heidelberg and later Oxford where he took up rowing. When competitors were rounded up to enter the first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens he was there. He won a medal and was received by the King. He could have gone anywhere to live but turn-of-the-century England suited him. My father’s immediate claim to fame was his invention of a special electrical battery which he patented in 1900. To prove that his battery was a viable product with a modern application, he took his battery-driven car on a London-to-Brighton run – and finished, which was enough to prove a point.

Always looking for greater challenges, he worked on developing a purely British aeroplane. He also started on the design of a British airship. Then Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo and World War One became inevitable.

After twenty years in England my father considered himself British in everything but birth and wished to stay there. Kaiser Bill wanted him back, since my father was one of the top designers of lighter-than-air aircraft, and he therefore had the negative choice of staying in England in a detention camp or returning to Germany. He closed up his house in New Maiden and served in the Prussian cavalry.

The war over, my father tried to return to England but his initial overtures to old British friends and business acquaintances met with a less than enthusiastic response. The horror and futility of the Great War had left a psychological scar on the nation’s psyche which was not easily healed. He always said that the detention camp would have been the lesser of two evils – and he would have improved his cricket . . .

It was a love of horses which brought my parents together. They’d met when he spotted her competing skilfully in a dressage event at a horse show in Treptow. She was thirty years younger than him and from a Lithuanian background, but their interest in horses bridged the gap. My father was never one to hang around and within the year they were married.

External events were not to allow them much time to enjoy their newly wedded happiness in Berlin. The Nazis were gaining influence and their rhetoric was directed with growing ferocity at the huge Jewish section of the community. My mother’s Jewish blood put her in jeopardy. My father thought long and hard about the situation. He would probably have decided to sit it out and see what happened if he’d been able to continue to design non-military airships, but already the Nazi influence was beginning to show so he decided to leave his job. Despite the fact that he was over retirement age, he was ordered to stay on. It was time to leave.

Reacting quickly, he sold whatever he could and left the rest with his friend and partner, Abe Mandelstamm. It wasn’t easy. The mounting number of attacks on Jews was turning the once elegant city into a hell-hole of racial discrimination and any Jew with a sense of history realised it was time to get out. This meant that the market was flooded with household goods and minor masterpieces. My family weren’t too badly off. In the good old days my father had bought a number of shares in British engineering companies. When times were hard, after World War One, he had been tempted to sell them. Now he was glad that he hadn’t. They would provide a nest-egg that would set him up in England.

My parents decided to take the route favoured by most émigrés, via Poland. There was just one small difficulty – me. I was due to be born at any minute. My father initially wanted to wait until after my birth but the authorities were getting heavy about his refusal to work on their war machines. He was picked up one night by men from the SSD, the State Security Service, and taken to Sachsenhausen – one of the first concentration camps – where he was told in unmistakable terms what would happen to him and his Jewish wife if he didn’t co-operate. It was four days before they put him in a black SSD car and dropped him off at home. My father had learned his lesson. My appearance would have to be postponed until the family was safely out of the country.

That might have been the plan but no one had consulted me. The train was crossing the Polish border when I made my untimely arrival. Once I was safely delivered, my mother begged my father to get back on the train and continue the journey. She would follow in a couple of days when she had recuperated. He should have listened to her. My arrival without a ticket hadn’t gone unnoticed and to ingratiate himself with an enquiring SSD man the station-master passed on the news. The SSD man checked with Berlin and my father was held for ‘further questioning’. They decided to take him back to the capital. At this point everyone’s attitude to us changed. Before, they had been almost happy that the small railway station of their medieval town had been turned into a makeshift maternity home. Once my father had been fingered everyone wanted my mother – and me – out.

My father had no intention of returning with the SSD man to Berlin if he could help it. When the train pulled in at Gdansk he took a chance and managed to slip away. He returned to us and decided that it would be wisest to lie low with members of my mother’s family in Grodno.

I have vague memories of life in Grodno, of idyllic, exciting fields to play in. Of course, in the wider world the war was now raging and when the SSD got wind of my father’s new address it did not take them long once more to ‘invite’ him to go to Gdansk with them to ‘discuss’ his contribution to the war effort. He tried to tell them that he had retired but they didn’t want to know about that. Reluctantly he agreed to go with them.

I was always allowed to sleep with my parents to keep warm and feel safe. They thought if there was any danger they could just grab me and be off. Now I watched my mother stand at the window most of the night, wrapped in her coat, blowing warm breath on the glass to make the ice flowers melt and wipe it clear so she could see my father coming back. She waited and watched but for many nights the road was empty.

At last one night her vigil was rewarded. My father had been devious. He had agreed with everything the SSD had said. They wanted him to work on long-range rockets, V2s at Penemünde. He told them he had no problem with that. The fact that he would have to work with forced-labour battalions wasn’t anything to get excited about either. They were so impressed that they made the error of letting him come home to pick up his family. He arrived in the middle of the night and, in spite of my grizzling, we were packed and on our way before the sun breached the eastern horizon.

Whenever I think of Poland it’s cold. Cold that cuts into your face like tiny razors and burns out your sinuses. There’s a smell about extreme cold that in small doses can be exhilarating. Day after day, for weeks on end, it gives you an overdose that has a touch of death about it. If you’re fuelled up with food and can occasionally find somewhere warm it can be endured. When you’re near starvation it’s not so easy to be sanguine.

But the cold was not our worst enemy. My family had no status, no money, no passports, no roots. If we stayed in one place for more than a couple of days our hosts became terrified and made it clear that they wanted us out of their house and miles away.

At last we found a safe haven with one of my mother’s relatives, who fixed up a barn so that, if soldiers came, we wouldn’t be in their home and they could pretend they didn’t know anything about us. It wasn’t at all bad. It was reasonably draught-proof and clean and, most important, we felt almost safe.

My parents would leave me in the barn for short spells while they helped around the farm. One morning I was on my own, asleep in the hay, when the door was thrust open and a woman ran in followed by a soldier. She seemed happy enough, giggling and playing some sort of game with the man. I was about to jump up and join in the fun when the mood changed. The woman’s squeals of laughter became shrieks of fear. I knew about fear. You have to keep away from its source in case you were contaminated. I stayed where I was hidden but could see everything. After a lot of thrashing around and moaning in the straw the soldier stood up, pulled up his trousers, buttoned his coat and left. The woman lay on the straw, whimpering to herself. I rushed to the kitchen and told my parents what I had seen. They were terrified. The thought of a soldier so close at hand had them practically in hysterics. They kept asking me over and over what exactly his uniform was like. I didn’t know. I couldn’t possibly know if he was German, Polish or Russian. No one thought to go and see if the woman was all right. They were too busy packing their bags.

Determined finally to get to Bialystok, we left that night. But whatever decision my parents took they would never be able to outrun the Nazis. They wanted my father and they were going to have him. He had become an ‘enemy of the Reich’ for deserting his country in its hour of need.

We arrived in Bialystok in the early hours of the morning. By wonderful coincidence my maternal grandparents had left Vilna a couple of months earlier and had come to Bialystok, where for some reason they felt safer, to stay with my grandmother’s brother. My maternal grandparents seemed genuinely pleased to see us. Our obvious distress surmounted the hostility they had expressed when they’d found that their darling daughter, Katja, had married a man so much older than herself. We spent the summer and autumn with them and everyone began to relax. Having my father living with them helped to warm my grandparents’ attitude towards him. It’s one of the happiest times I can remember from my early childhood. There were children of my own age to play with and we spent hours catching crickets and making them jump, and digging up mounds in search of moles. In spite of long hours invested in the sport I don’t think we ever actually unearthed one.

The fields were surrounded by ditches which were part of an old irrigation system. There were a few small dams at strategic places which could be released if too much water was backing up. It only happened a couple of times while we were there but it was something to remember. Once, the river dried out in places, leaving only small, deep pools. The fish knew about those pools and made for them when the water level started to sink. They should have been safe. But that’s life. Just when you think you are home free something falls on you from a great height. When the water was low it was us kids that fell on the corralled fish. We harvested enough trout and crayfish to keep the table supplied for days.

German activity in the area had been pretty spasmodic so far. There had been a little detachment of troops bivouacking about two kilometres away in an old quarry but they were generally civil and the few times they had come to the house it had been merely to buy eggs. My father told everyone to treat them like guests in the hope that they might act the part and not embarrass their hosts. The ploy worked for a long time.

By this time we were surrounded by a lot of refugees. Nobody liked the danger they represented but to turn them away seemed so heartless that neither my father nor my grandfather nor uncle could bring himself to do it. Unfortunately the increased refugee activity had drawn the Nazis’ attention and they were only too happy to vent their anger over the reverses at the front. These, combined with the Luftwaffe’s inability to clear the skies of British Spitfires and the demoralising raids on Berlin, had changed how the Nazis saw themselves. Before, they had been able to strut around making high-handed decisions under the illusion that they were masters of the universe. Slowly it now dawned on them that maybe the whole of Europe wasn’t going to roll over and play dead. The assurance of their leaders that reverses in Russia, the annihilation of the Luftwaffe and America entering the war were just annoying blips in the master plan was beginning to sound a bit like drowning by numbers. The result was another push to round up anyone who could be called a threat to the 1000-year Reich.

The troops arrived in their usual impressive manner: a couple of motor-bike outriders to clear the road, a saloon car and three trucks to pick up anyone they came across. They had obviously had a busy day. The trucks were already bulging with depressed-looking citizens stoically enduring the teeth-chipping experience of riding in the back of the rudimentarily sprung lorry. The people were unloaded from the trucks and stood around in the freezing night, waiting for further developments.

A man in a long leather coat and a smart snap-brimmed trilby knocked on the front door and politely asked my father to accompany him. There was nothing my father could do but agree. He did get a bit of a concession. He was allowed to bring my mother and me along. My mother wanted time to pack but was told there was no problem, she would be back long before she knew what was happening. Nobody believed that but so far everything had been fairly restrained and no one wanted to push at the shaky envelope of safety.

Outside, the little group of refugees, who had been our house guests for weeks, were made to join the people who had arrived on the lorries and looked pretty discouraged. My grandparents, Albert and Melanie, were among them. My father asked the trilby if they could come with us and, unbelievably, he agreed. As we climbed on the back of the lorry and jolted off along the rutted cart track the soldiers started herding the new arrivals and the refugees into one of the barns. I still wonder what happened to them.