Tag Archives: Nazi persecution of Jews

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, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles

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Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles. Pt 2 of The Novel of Ferrara, translated from the Italian by Jamie McKendrick (W.W. Norton, 2016). First published 1958

Giorgio Bassani revised a sequence of novels and short stories into a single entity as The Novel of Ferrara in 1974 and 1980. In my previous post I discussed the first part of this compilation: a collection of five short stories, Within the Walls. Its title reflects the action of each story, which takes place within the massive city walls that encircle the centre of the city of Bassani’s youth, Ferrara, in Emilia-Romagna, near Bologna and Venice.

The anonymous narrator of most of these works is evidently a character very similar to Bassani himself: a middle-aged Jewish man who is usually looking back to his youth and childhood in Ferrara, witnessing the rise of the fascist party from the 1920s, the increasingly extreme antisemitism and intolerance towards groups perceived by the party to be sub-human – in particular the previously well-integrated Jewish community, and in the case of The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, homosexuals.

It’s a novel that has a strong Death in Venice element. The wearer of the titular glasses is Dr Athos Fadigati, an ENT specialist who comes to Ferrara in 1919 and rapidly establishes himself as an eminent medical specialist. He runs his own ‘magnificent private clinic’, and becomes director of the ENT department of ‘the big, new Sant’Anna Hospital. He’d made it, as they say.’

By the time the story proper gets under way, he’s well established, much appreciated for his ‘courteous, discreet manners…disinterestedness and the fair-minded spirit of charity toward his poorer patients.’ His clinic, with its efficient, modern ways, becomes popular, even fashionable.

It is pretty obvious that this mild, refined, rather timid and liberal man is gay. Around 1930, when Fadigati was about 40, the townsfolk figure out the truth. They choose to be indulgent; his discreet ‘style’ suits them, and they can pretend not to know about his ‘sexual abnormalities’ – just as they turn a blind eye to the increasingly violent and repressive behaviour of the fascist thugs who rule their society.

An arrogant, selfish young man, Deliliers, commutes with a group of fellow students, including the narrator, on the train to Bologna, where they attend the university (as Bassani did). The doctor, another occasional commuter, gradually insinuates himself into their group. He’s evidently attracted to this boisterous group of young people, being a lonely but sociable man. Deliliers singles him out for exploitation.

The plot culminates in scenes on the beach near Rimini. The narrator and his family are on holiday there, and the adults who know Fadigati from their home city are scandalised when they see him appear daily at his beach hut, waiting forlornly for Deliliers: they are openly sharing a room, and are seen to be flaunting their affair.

It comes as no surprise that Deliliers treats the kindly doctor very badly. The theme of betrayal and bigotry (Deliliers is clearly homophobic, and just uses the doctor as a sugar daddy, with a view to punishing and humiliating him while fleecing him) parallels that of the intolerant attitudes towards and treatment of the Jewish citizens of Ferrara by the fascists and the complacently complicit Ferrarese citizens who support and endorse them.

Bassani doesn’t labour this connection, and it’s in the beach scenes that his narrative skill is best seen. Many of these feature discussions of politics and morality between the narrator, his father, and a family of fellow Ferrara citizens who often sit near them on the sands of the Adriatic beach:

Romantic, patriotic, politically naïve and inexperienced like so many Jews of his generation, my father, returning from the Front in 1919, had also enrolled in the Fascist Party. He had thus been a Fascist from the “very beginning” and at heart remained one despite his gentleness and his honesty. But since Mussolini, after the early scuffles, had begun to reach an agreement with Hitler, my father had started to feel uneasy. He never stopped thinking about the possibility of an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Italy as well, and suffering from it, he would allow the odd bitter word against the Regime to escape him.

The matriarch of the other family is viciously homophobic towards Fadigati, who had taken to joining the narrator’s family group, which had welcomed him into their company as a cultured and decent man. She also enthusiastically praises Il Duce – ‘so very human’, ‘a good husband’ with a ‘great heart’. Her husband agrees with this gushing, blinkered view: ‘”let’s not forget it,”’ he says, Mussolini ‘”has given us the Empire.”’ The narrator’s father registers wide-eyed astonishment as the couple continue to eulogise Mussolini’s ‘generous Romagnolo blood’.

On another occasion she claims ‘objectivity’ in arguing that one had to ‘accept and recognize’ the ‘undeniable greatness’ of Hitler’s Germany. When the narrator sneeringly points out that Hitler himself ‘disposed of’ the Chancellor of Austria, Dollfuss (murdered by a group of Austrian Nazis in 1934), she simply snorts, ‘”That’s of no importance!”’ She goes on that ‘in certain circumstances’ a head of state must be ‘“capable of moving beyond the delicate feelings of the common people, of the small people like ourselves.”’

This kind of bigotry, with its dismissal of more rational moral and political objections is only too often being seen in today’s discourse. In the USA, Europe (including now the UK, with its extreme right wing Reform party increasingly dominating the polls and media) and elsewhere this kind of enthusiasm for populism and nationalism is a cause of growing concern among those of us who value a liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian way of living.

When the Racial Laws are introduced by Mussolini the year of these beach scenes, 1938, a ‘crude campaign of vilification’ against the Jews in the press is met with incredulity by the narrator’s father. The narrator can’t bear to go to the beach where the fascist sympathising woman enthusiastically justifies these draconian measures. He’s increasingly frustrated with his father’s indignant, mystified protestations that the Jews had always displayed ‘patriotic merits’ and been ‘most distinguished Fascists’. He sees his father as having been naïve to have ever believed that the Jews had truly been accepted and assimilated into Italian society.

The narrator resigns himself to a life of marginalisation, exclusion and ‘internal exile’, of the kind we see in almost every story in this sequence of works. The elegiac tone of the narrative, as these events are recalled by the narrator a couple of decades after they took place, reinforces the poignant force of the novel.

Walter Kempowski, All For Nothing

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Walter Kempowski, All For Nothing, Granta 2016; first published in German 2006 Translated by Anthea Bell

Kempowski’s much-praised novel gives a perspective of WWII that I don’t recall often being depicted in fiction: the fate of rural German civilians in 1945 facing the advancing Red Army.

The setting is a once grand country estate in East Prussia that has fallen into decline. Most of the land has been sold off, and the decaying fabric of the buildings symbolises the general decline of the family that owns the estate, and by extension the German (and Nazi) cause. Eberhard, the current owner, is away in Italy serving (as an officer, of course) with the German army – though he seems to spend his time savouring the local wine and flirting with the girls.

In the first two thirds of the novel we follow the humdrum lives of the remaining members of the household: Eberhard’s beautiful, dreamy wife Katharina, their equally dreamy 12-year-old son, Peter, and their crabby eccentric ‘Auntie’, who runs things.

Over these weeks a number of refugees show up and are reluctantly allowed to stay temporarily in the house as they flee from the dreaded approaching Russians. It becomes increasingly apparent that the family can no longer avoid the inevitable invasion, and must join the stream of refugees heading south and west, believing the Reich will protect them there and ultimately turn back the Red tide.

I found this long section a bit of a slog at times: it’s written (and very ably translated by Anthea Bell) in a style that’s vaguely modernist. There are frequent non sequiturs and repeated tropes, such as the illicit trip to a Baltic seaside resort that Katharina made with a local political bigwig, and which she often daydreams about. Very little of consequence happens. But that’s the point: these are decadent, indolent people who live in a bubble, ignoring the atrocities perpetrated by their countrymen, and preferring the languid pose of complacent country gentry.

The final third is very different. As the family and their servants join the flood of refugees, they witness and experience terrible privations and death. Katharina is forced by circumstances to remain behind – her prospects don’t look good. This final section is taut and gripping, and shockingly abrupt.

The novel’s bleak title is spoken by Auntie as the family group flee: did she devote her life, unmarried, to this minor aristocratic family for nothing?

All For Nothing is strangely indirect or muted about the Nazi regime, despite frequent inserted ‘heil Hitler’ greetings – but the socio-political critique is implicit in every sentence.

Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl

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Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl (Fig Tree, 2018)

Mrs TD heard this non-fiction book being discussed enthusiastically on the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read. Our excellent Cornwall Libraries provided this hardback copy within days of my reserving it.

We recently travelled through the Netherlands, which brought back memories of visiting Amsterdam over the years: the Anne Frank House, the Jewish Museum and quarter. I thought I knew a fair bit about the murderous treatment of Jewish people under the German occupation, and the ways some Dutch residents risked their lives to harbour some of them in their own homes. This book changed this perception.

Bart van Es was born in the Netherlands and is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. The Cut Out Girl is his account of tracing the role played by his Dutch grandparents (and many others) in hiding a young Jewish girl during WWII. She’s only eight years old when her parents make the agonising decision to send her to live with a family of strangers before they are sent to the death camps. Van Es tracks her down – she’s now a woman in her eighties, living in Amsterdam – and gets to know and interview her during several visits to her home.

At first Lien (short for Hesseline) is a little reluctant to divulge the emotional side of her story to her ‘nephew’ (as he’s pleased to be called when she introduces him to a visitor: after all, she isn’t a blood relative, even though she came to call the van Es adults – Bart’s grandparents who sheltered — her as mother and father). He uses his academic research skills to fill out the details in the basic narrative she gives him.

Much of this factual part is reasonably familiar and predictable to those of us brought up on stories like Anne Frank’s. After staying in Dordrecht (which we visited on our recent trip) with the van Es family, Lien was moved several times as her hiding places were compromised. She had to stay for weeks and months on end confined to the house, often in a secret concealed room, not even able to look out of a window for fear of being discovered or betrayed. No school, no friends.

Not surprisingly, deprived of almost all contact with other people, she became anxious, emotionally volatile and vulnerable. And now we come to the part of the book that I hadn’t expected, and this is its most powerful and shocking element. Some of those who risked everything to shelter her did not treat her kindly. In one house she was made to fill the role of a housemaid, and shown little or no affection. She experienced even worse treatment in other houses.

We hear about Lien’s life after the war, until the time the author got to know her and elicit her story. She was clearly psychologically damaged by the terrible times she’d lived through. All of her family were murdered by the Nazis. It was only in the previous few years, just before Bart van Es tracked her down, that she’d managed to achieve some kind of peace.

The other key feature of Lien’s sad life was that she had become estranged from the van Es ‘parents’ who had harboured her – hence one sense of the ambiguous title of the book. Lien was ‘cut out’ from her foster family, as well as from her own. The reason for this rift is only revealed towards the end of the book, and it’s another indication of how much more complicated the situation was in the relations between the persecuted Jewish population in wartime Holland and the rest of the Dutch people – and it’s a poignant indication of how deeply flawed we human beings are – even when we seem to be acting nobly.

This is a deeply moving, often disturbing account of what happened in Holland during the war. I hadn’t realised that the Dutch Jewish population suffered so terribly: their wartime death rate of 80% was more than double that in any other western country, including France, Belgium, Italy, or even Austria and Germany. Of 18,000 Jews who lived in Lien’s home town of the Hague in 1940, only 2,000 survived. I shared van Es’s response to these facts: ‘For me, brought up on the myth of Dutch resistance, this comes as a shock,’ he writes. There were various demographic and social reasons for this, but it was also a result of the ‘active participation of Dutch citizens – who did the work of informing on neighbours, arrest, imprisonment and deportation.’ The Dutch authorities delivered 107,000 ‘full Jews’ to their German masters. These people were then sent to the death camps in the east.

Another important feature emerges. When he first arrives to interview Lien, he’s aware that a group of youngsters of ‘north African appearance’ are eyeing him with suspicion. He’s aware that his presence, and the nature of what he’s investigating, are not received with as positive a response as that of the white European Dutch. He points out that since the seventies the Netherlands has been a ‘country of immigration’. One fifth of its population were born outside its borders, or are descendants of these immigrants. Integration has been only ‘moderately successful’.

These are sobering insights. Van Es refers to the far-right politician Geert Wilders’ party getting 15% of the vote in local elections at the time of this book’s publication in 2018. Just last month his anti-Islam PVV party, with its extreme policies on immigration, and advocacy of banning the Qu’ran and mosques, became the largest party in the national elections. Wilders looks likely to lead the next Dutch government. This in a country often seen as an exemplar of liberal views and tolerance of diversity.

My own government seems intent on going down a similar route of ‘taking back control’ of its borders (as they mendaciously boasted during the Brexit campaign), as it redoubles its inhumane (and probably illegal) efforts to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, which it disingenuously insists is a safe and reasonable place for desperate people, many of them persecuted and endangered in their home countries, to be dumped so that we don’t have to see them in our towns and villages. I’m in despair at the ways in which democratic institutions are being rejected, and the world seems to be headed towards the kind of environment that enabled the Nazis to perpetrate the horrors of WWII on people like Lien.

Welcome to Tredynas Days!

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This is my first entry after a few trial posts over the last few weeks.  If you follow me on Twitter – @TredynasDays – or view my Facebook page with the same name you’ll have an idea what kinds of things I’m interested in: books, literature, creative writing, mostly, but also football, dogs, cricket, Cornwall (where I live); sometimes all of these at the same time.  My first piece reflects the wonderful material the internet can throw up; I came across earlier today a wonderful site called Public Domain Review.  It’s a free online journal showcasing the most interesting out-of-copyright material available digitally.  There’s a wonderful article, for example, on Dog Stories from The Spectator by J St Loe Strachey (1895), which contains stories of dogs who could shop for cakes, distinguishing halfpennies from pennies (two cakes for a penny; he wouldn’t leave the shop until the second cake appeared after he’d eaten the first); a dog who would bury live frogs in his garden; hospital dogs, syllogistic and sermonising dogs…you get the picture.   There’s a link to the original text: highly recommended.  Check out the article on Mary Toft, a Surrey woman who in 1726 claimed she’d given birth to a litter of bunnies.  It’s an absolute treasure-trove of the kind Walter Benjamin would have loved; and yes, there’s an article about him and his posthumously published masterpiece, the fascicles (he called them ‘convolutes’) that make up The Arcades Project, a MS of which he had in his bag when he committed suicide at the border town of Port Bou in 1940, having been fleeing the Nazis. Here’s an image from the article by Anca Pusca of a ‘passage’ mentioned in the book; many of Benjamin’s writings have now entered the public domain, and there are links to them after her piece on him.

Arcades Project: Galerie Vivienne c. 1820

Galerie Vivienne Paris