Tag Archives: Holocaust

What would I have done?

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Jonathan Freedland, The Traitors Circle: the rebels against the Nazis and the spy who betrayed them. John Murray hardback 2025. 456 pp (incl. nearly 100 pp. of notes).

I was given this book for Christmas. It’s a grim but fascinating account that’s tersely summed up in the title.

From 1933 until the height of WWII, brave groups (circles) of German anti-fascists met in secret and shared dissident views, often at tea-party salons. Most of them were from the old Weimar establishment, or minor aristocrats who abhorred the increasingly brutal and repressive government of Hitler and the collusion of what seemed to be the majority of the German people who treated him as little less than a god.

Some of these rebels did more than just talk – they took direct action, giving shelter to fleeing Jews, or helping them find safe hiding places, or even guiding them along escape routes to evade the terrible fate so many of their fellows.

Freedland, a Guardian journalist whose Jewish family suffered bereavement as a consequence of the V2 bombing campaign against London towards the end of the war, has clearly researched this topic extensively. The treachery of the spy mentioned in the subtitle, who wormed his way into one of these circles, resulted in the gruesome executions of many of those he identified to the Gestapo. The author traces in great detail the fates of a number of the most prominent, brave rebels.

The final sections portray the reversal of fortunes after the war. The downfall of the Hitler regime led to the famous investigations and trials of many of the most prominent Nazis who had been responsible for the holocaust and the vicious treatment of those who had dared to defy them.

Sadly, some of the most culpable managed to avoid retribution.

The question books like this always raise, as Freedland suggests in the note at the start, is: what would I have done if I had been a German citizen in the thirties? We live in a time of frightening instability and polarised attitudes to the rule-based order that has prevailed for most of the decades following the cold war. Every day there are new stories about the capacity for the American president to hasten what increasingly looks like the downfall of liberal democracy in the West.

That same question arises in slightly different form today: what can we do – if anything? All the usual supports for democracy, like the rule of law, mutual respect among the allied western countries, NATO solidarity, and so on, are regularly attacked and demolished by DT and his obsequious acolytes. It used to seem an exaggeration to liken the regime he is creating to that of 1930s Germany, but now I’m not so sure.

It seems churlish to end this post on a slightly negative note, but here goes. Freedland’s prose style is too much like that of a minor thriller writer. Too many chapters end on a supposedly chilling cliffhanger. One selected at random from early in the book is ‘among them was the man who would become her biggest secret’. Others are along the lines of “little did they know that he was not what he seemed”, or ‘proof of [danger] came sooner than anyone would have expected – with the tea-party’s first death’ (p. 198). This is such a powerful, chilling and salutary story, it doesn’t need this kind of pulp-fiction prose.

Giorgio Bassani, Behind the Door

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Giorgio Bassani, Behind the Door (first published 1964).  The Novel of Ferrara, part 4. Translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick (Norton, 2018)

As in the previous sections of Bassani’s collection of stories and novels set in and around the northern Italian walled city of Ferrara, the narrator is clearly a character very like Bassani himself, and features centrally in this novel. As usual he narrates from the viewpoint of an adult looking back several decades, in this case to his childhood.

He informs us early on that he had been unhappy many times in his life, often touching ‘the depths of despair’. Few of these periods, however were ‘blacker’ for him than the first months October 1929 to June 1930. This kind of reflection is also found in the previous works in this sequence, featuring episodes later in his early adult life, when the fascist regime was becoming more violently anti-Semitic.

The years since those secondary school days he describes as not of ‘any use’, and his suffering was ‘a hidden wound, secretly bleeding’. He had just moved up from what we in the UK call primary school to the secondary (or senior high) school – aged about 14. He knows hardly any of the other youngsters in the class, some of whom are older than him (some would be resitting a year), he dislikes his new teachers, and he feels ‘out of place and deeply uneasy’ – another aspect of his experience that is familiar from the previous works in The Novel of Ferrara sequence.

A line from Dante’s ‘Canzoni’, expounded during an Italian lesson, resonates with him as he recalls this dark time: ‘The exile imposed on me I hold as an honor’ (this being an American edition, the spelling is American). As a member of Ferrara’s Jewish community, the narrator/Bassani returns to the central theme of state-authorised persecution that was exacerbated terribly with the introduction of Mussolini’s so-called Racial Laws of 1938. When he reflects on what became of Carlo, one of his cleverest classmates, with whom he lost contact when he left school, he adds:

‘Our generation has been buffeted about like few others. The war and all the rest of it obliterated a multitude of our intentions and vocations…’

That seemingly casual ‘all the rest of it’ encompasses the initial ostracization and internal exile imposed on the Jewish population, culminating in the extermination camps in Germany to which so many were transported in the early 1940s. This no doubt accounts for the sombre tone and dark mood that pervades this whole sequence of semi-autobiographical works.

He longs to be accepted and befriended by the cooler, less angsty kids, but harbours a deep resentment towards them as well, including Carlo: ‘I loathed him, I admired and envied him at the same time.’ Talk about mixed up.

Then Luciano, a new boy, joins the class, and shares a desk with him. He’s skinny, awkward and submissively ingratiating. The narrator immediate dislikes him, too, but finds himself, against his better judgement, taking him home to do homework together. An odd couple friendship slowly forms.

When the narrator learns an unpleasant aspect of Luciano’s character, he is unable to confront him. An ‘encounter with the truth’ is beyond him; he feels ‘nailed by birth to a destiny of exclusion and resentment’, and ‘it was useless to think I’d ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding. I just couldn’t do it – there was no remedy. Not now. Not ever.’

This probably all sounds very depressing, and this novel is initially less engaging than the first three sections of this sequence. The narrator resembles Joyce’s anguished character Stephen Dedalus, without the self-belief in his own literary merit and promise. But on looking back on it I can see that Behind the Doorprovides a fascinating insight into Bassani’s own experience of those dreadful years of oppression – a fascist initiative that was enthusiastically embraced by his non-Jewish fellow citizens.

It’s no wonder that he felt excluded and emotionally conflicted by his schooldays when he looked back on them from the perspective of a man who lived through the holocaust, in which most of his family and friends were murdered, while his fellow citizens – some of whom would have been his classmates – were complicit in the persecution and genocide. That door he hides behind protects him from truths that are too awful to contemplate.

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes

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Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: a hidden inheritance. Vintage books paperback, 2011. First published 2010

I posted recently on the secret Cornish garden of some neighbour friends and their handsome Siamese cats. One of these friends lent me a copy of this book. I finished it with some powerful mixed feelings.

Edmund de Waal expresses some conflicting feelings about the book himself just a few pages from the end; he tells an acquaintance that he’s writing a book about…and stumbles to a halt:

I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.

De Waal Hare Amber Eyes coverIt’s all of those things – uncategorizable. Ostensibly it is about the provenance of his collection of over 200 netsuke – the small ivory or wooden objects crafted by Japanese artists well over a century ago. Originally intended as ornamental but useful toggles to hang from cords attached to traditional dress, they became sought after objets d’art in late 19C Europe, during the Japonisme craze, when they first entered the collection of one of de Waal’s Ephrussi ancestors in Paris.

From there they migrated as a wedding present to another family member in Vienna. They subsequently travelled via Japan to England and were inherited by de Waal.

But this is not just a cute social history of Europe in 200 objects. It’s a profile of a wealthy, important Proustian family told not from the viewpoint of an academic historian, but by a person deeply connected emotionally and genetically to the subject – his own family.

His Jewish ancestors made their fortune originally in Odessa, importers and exporters of Russian grain. From there they expanded into banking, with branches in several major European capitals. But as a Jewish family based largely in Vienna, they were dangerously vulnerable to the vicious ‘final solution’ of the Nazis, culminating in the holocaust.

Another involuntary diaspora of the Ephrussi family ensued.

Hare netsuke

Hare netsuke from the collection, in the public domain via Wikimedia Images, attribution: Lostrobots / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

De Waal gives a highly personal, deeply moving account of this only too well-known tragic and shameful period of history. These are people he’s enabled us to get to know, with their love affairs and foibles, their poignant attempts to fit in to an Austrian society which only superficially accepts them, but ultimately despises them. They are outsiders, resented, and the Anschluss gives their bigoted, hypocritical Christian neighbours the opportunity to release all the pent-up animosity and envy that they’d harboured for decades.

I found the book a deeply moving and sometimes upsetting experience, but I admit to some misgivings in my response. It’s probably a kind of inverted snobbery to find the long descriptions of the sumptuous opulence of the Ephrussi palaces, packed with mismatched and priceless artworks, furniture and other stuff, and the fraternising with royalty, aristocracy and famous artists and writers, just a little too Downton Abbey at times.

This is not a noble response, I know, and this doesn’t diminish the horror I felt at the inevitable brutality of the persecutions, humiliations and terror the family underwent at the hands of the most despicable people Europe has known.

It’s gratifying to read about the last major Ephrussi that de Waal tells us about in detail: his much-loved great-uncle Iggy, living with increasing happiness with his Japanese companion, and finally restoring the netsuke to a home that appreciates them. As Edmund de Waal did himself when he inherited them.

He spends much of the last third of the book profiling his brilliant grandmother, Elisabeth. She was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Vienna, gained a doctorate and became a lawyer. In the twenties she married a Dutchman named Hendrik de Waal, and settled into domesticity in England in the thirties. She was a poet, corresponded with Rilke, and wrote five novels; one of these, a semi-autobiographical family history set in Vienna in the 1950s, and referred to frequently in The Hare, was published in 2013 as The Exiles Return, and is now available as a Persephone Books paperback.