Alone

For Europeans the approach to World War Two did not take place as a sudden event like Pearl Harbor but instead in the form of a numbing series of crises occurring at an increasingly rapid rate, each one more serious than the last, culminating in catastrophe.

As a child these crises did not have much, if any, effect on me until war finally came and changed my life as it did everyone’s, most far more harshly than mine. All the same, I saw, I remember, and by now, more than seventy-five years after the events that led to war, it is possible to know exactly what happened, and why, and to write about it objectively. All wars occur from a succession of mistakes, usually on both sides, and of no war is that more true than the Second World War.

Mine was a privileged childhood, and for that reason I, like several thousand other English children, ended up to my surprise in the United States as a kind of first-class refugee, set comfortably adrift by the war.

I have no complaints. This is not a tale of suffering; it is an attempt to explain what happened between the halcyon days of the summer of 1939, at the end of which war broke out, and the harsh awakening in the summer of 1940. Then we—the British—found ourselves alone, having misjudged the French Army’s strength and placed ourselves in a position where what remained of our army was returning from the beaches of Dunkirk in small boats, having abandoned its equipment and its arms, leaving most of Western Europe in German hands.

How we arrived there, on the brink of disaster, is the subject of this book, at once the modest account of my family’s dispersal, and a history of the greater events that led to Dunkirk, and to Britain’s “finest hour,” as Winston Churchill called it.

Memory is not an exact instrument. As we grow older we tend to impose the present on the past, or to remember what we wish had happened rather than what actually did. I was—a phrase that did not then exist—“a movie brat,” for everyone in my family either made films or, in the case of the women, acted in them. My uncle Alexander Korda was a famous film director and producer, a “movie mogul” who challenged the Hollywood studio moguls on his own terms. My uncle Zoltan was a famed film director, my father, Vincent, an internationally renowned film art director, my “auntie Merle” Oberon a major movie star, my aunt Joan and my mother respected actresses. Ours was not an ordinary family, but war changes everybody’s life, so this is also partly the story of how our lives were reshaped by the events around us, which my uncle Alex and his brothers could perhaps read more clearly than most because they were born in Central Europe, and therefore had no difficulty understanding what Hitler stood for—or what he intended to do.

They had no illusions about Nazi Germany, which is more than can be said for a lot of powerful and respected people on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1930s, and even in 1939 and 1940.

It is to those so much less fortunate than myself that I also dedicate this book.