All Hell Let Loose (58 page)

The Zagaris were able to exploit their wealth to deliver them from the worst privations, as most Italians could not. When the icy winter of 1944 came, disease, lack of fuel and food imposed a bitter toll on civilians, especially children. One mother said: ‘Suddenly my little girl became unwell. The doctor said it was colitis – a death which took five hours, an indescribable agony. The house was freezing and Gigeto [her husband] ran to buy lots of bottles to fill with hot water. I put her in our bed and held her close with the bottles around her. “Gigeto,” I screamed, “Santina must not die.” But she did.’ Many people who had lost their homes by bombardment or expulsion were reduced to a primitive mountain existence, as a young girl described: ‘The cold and damp of the caves got into our bones. My mother crouched in a corner clutching my three-month-old brother in her arms. She told me to go into the town and find a doctor. I ran like a hare, but found that he was away from home – at the house of the Podestàs whose son had a high temperature like my brother. Eventually he gave me a prescription – but he wouldn’t give me any of the drugs that were on his table. He said he would come and visit, but when he arrived my little brother was already dead.’ Their distraught mother said, ‘My baby boy died because my milk was bad because I didn’t eat enough.’ She was one among millions.

People displaced from their homes and countries spent much of the war waiting: for orders or visas; an opportunity to flee from looming peril; permission to travel. Twenty-one-year-old English girl Rosemary Say, having escaped from German internment into the Vichy zone of France, kicked her heels for weeks in Marseilles among an unhappy community of fellow fugitives: ‘It was sad to see the waste of intellect and ability as the delays lengthened and the future for many continued to look bleak. Had he got his visa at last, had he been arrested or just scarpered into the countryside to try his luck? We waited and wondered. But if the person didn’t come back he was soon forgotten. We were only really held together by a common wish to be off and away and to begin our lives again … There was a lot of suspicion and hopelessness … Feelings ran high and quarrels were loud and violent. We all shared the worry of our uncertainty.’

Ukrainian teenager Stefan Kurylak was shipped westwards by the German occupiers to labour for an Austrian Alpine farming family, devout Catholics named Klaunzer. On first sighting the boy, Frau Klaunzer burst into tears; without knowing why, the young Ukrainian followed suit. It was explained to him that the Klaunzers’ son had been killed on the Eastern Front a few weeks before. Frau Klaunzer kept mouthing one of the few German phrases Stefan could understand: ‘Hitler no good! Hitler no good!’ Stefan was thereafter treated with kindness and humanity: he worked on the family land, not unhappily, until the end of the war, when his hosts begged him in vain to stay on as one of themselves.

Few such experiences were so benign. Fourteen-year-old Pole Arthur Pozna
ski returned to the Piotrków ghetto one day in October 1942 from the Hortensja glassworks where he and his younger brother Jerzyk worked. He was handed a crumpled note by a member of the ghetto’s Jewish militia. It was from his mother. There had been a deportation: ‘We are being taken. May God help you, Arthur. We cannot do anything more for you, and whatever may happen, look after Jerzyk. He is but a child and has got no one else, so be his brother and parent. Goodbye …’ Arthur, passionately moved, kept repeating to himself, ‘I’ll try! Yes, I’ll try!’ But he thought, ‘How? I felt so lonely and helpless.’ The boys spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, separated by hundreds of miles, but both miraculously survived; the rest of their family perished.

The British endured six years of austerity and spasmodic bombardment. The night blackout promoted moral as well as physical gloom. Yet the circumstances of Churchill’s islands were much preferable to those of Continental societies, where hunger and violence were endemic. Like North America, Britain was shielded by expanses of sea, relative personal freedom and wealth. Privileged Britons remained privileged indeed: ‘The extraordinary thing about the war was that people who really didn’t want to be involved in it were not,’ the novelist Anthony Powell wrote afterwards.

This was true, within a limited social milieu. The week before D-Day, as 250,000 young American and British soldiers made final preparations for hurling themselves at Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, in London Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary: ‘Woke half drunk and had a long, busy morning – getting my hair cut, trying to verify quotations in the London Library, which is still in disorder from its bomb, visiting Nancy [Mitford, at her bookshop]. At luncheon I again got drunk. Went to the Beefsteak [Club], which I have just joined … Back to White’s [Club] – more port. Went to Waterloo in an alcoholic stupor, got the train to Exeter and slept most of the way.’

Waugh was untypical; many of the friends with whom he caroused were on leave from active service, and several were dead a year later. The German V-weapon assault was about to commence, inflicting fresh death and destruction on war-weary Britons. But, just as life in New York or Chicago was much more comfortable than life in London or Liverpool, so Londoners were vastly better off than the inhabitants of Paris, Naples, Athens, any city in the Soviet Union or China. Lancashire housewife Nella Last reflected in October 1942 that her war had thus far inflicted little hardship or suffering, ‘in comparison to three-quarters of Stalingrad being demolished during the first bombardment. We have had food, shelter and warmth when millions have had none – what will be the price we will have to pay? – we cannot expect to go on “escaping”, there
is
no escape for any of us. I saw a neighbour’s baby today and I felt a sudden understanding for those who “refuse to bring babies into the world now”. All this talk of “new worlds” and “after the war”, no talk of the suffering, the anguish, before all this is over.’

Mrs Last was unusually sensitive; most of her compatriots were too preoccupied by their own present troubles to concern themselves with the larger but remote miseries of others. On 22 November 1942, housewife Phyllis Crook wrote to her thirty-two-year-old husband serving in North Africa: ‘Christmas is going to be a beastly time and I’m hating the thought of it. However it’s got to be got on with “as usual” and I have been busy trying hard to get things for all the kids of our acquaintance. It would be so easy to say “I can’t get anything” and leave it at that. It is so cold … How I wish I could retire for the winter instead of constantly shivering. Chris [their small son] asked God to make you a good boy tonight! Well my love news seems very scarce and I must say goodnight. Life seems too mouldy for words. I wonder when we shall see you again. It all seems horribly far away and doesn’t bear too much thinking about. Look after yourself, my dear and don’t go going into any danger, as Daddy would say! All my love always, dearest Phil. PS Joyce is now working in a factory 11 hours a day. John Young has had malaria.’

Mrs Crook’s woes would seem trivial, her self-pity contemptible, to many people of war-ravaged nations. Her own life and those of her children were unimperilled, and they were not even hungry. But separation from her husband, the necessity to occupy lodgings far from her east London home, the drab monotony of wartime existence seemed to her, like many others, sufficient causes for unhappiness. And ten days after writing that letter she became a widow, when her husband was killed in action.

News of the violent and premature deaths of distant loved ones was a pervasive feature of the wartime experience. Often, little was known of their fate, as J.R. Ackerley noted in a poem published in the
Spectator
:

Countless families struggled to come to terms with loss. British Army officer’s wife Diana Hopkinson described a reunion with her husband on a station platform in Berkshire, after a long separation during which they received news that his brother had been killed in action. ‘His strange uniform, his strangely thin face glimpsed in the dimmest light, gave me a feeling of artificiality. Even in our kisses there was something unreal. In bed there was a terrible sadness to overcome – Pat’s death – before we could make love. When at last he turned towards me, we made love as if we were partners in a solemn rite, strange, speechless, but familiar.’

Sheffield housewife Edie Rutherford was just preparing tea when her young neighbour, the wife of an RAF pilot, knocked on the door. ‘Her face was wooden and she jerked out: “Mrs Rutherford, Henry is missing,” thrust the telegram into my hand. Of course I just opened my arms and took her in and let her have a good weep the while I cursed audibly this blasted war. “He isn’t dead. I’m sure he isn’t dead. He was home only last Wednesday. He’s alive somewhere and worrying because he knows I’ll get this telegram to upset me” … It is difficult to know what to say to a wife in such trouble. I did my best, poor lass. Felt myself as if my inside had fallen out. I wish to goodness this war would end.’

Housewife Jean Wood recorded: ‘I had a very nice lady and her husband, neighbours. She was having her son on leave and she didn’t have any meat for him. But that particular day the butcher let me have some rabbit … a taste treat. I didn’t want the rabbit, ’cause I’d rather give my small children an egg, if I could get eggs. So I took the rabbit round to her. She was so thrilled. On that particular day, her son was killed. We could have flung the rabbit anywhere, for all we cared. He was such a nice boy, a young officer, nineteen years old.’ They were all ‘nice boys’, to those obliged to mourn them.

Muriel Green, one of Britain’s 80,000 ‘land girls’ providing agricultural labour, burst into tears on the last night of a home leave in Norfolk in June 1942. ‘I cried because of the war. It has altered our life which can never be the same. To see the desolate emptiness of the seaside upsets me. When you are away and Mother writes to say the latest desecration, the latest boy missing, the latest family to sacrifice, it is just words. But in the home it is mortifying. Life will never be so sweet as before the war, and the last two summers and early ’39 were the most perfect years of my life when all seemed young and gay. I could have cried for hours had I not known it was upsetting Mother.’

American Dellie Hahne was one of many women who married the wrong man amid the stress and emotional extravagance of the time, and repented at leisure during the years that followed. ‘He was a soldier. He could not be anything but a marvelous, magnificent human being,’ she said, with the ruefulness of one who learned better. She came to pity others who experienced domestic miseries: ‘Pregnant women who could barely balance in a rocking train, going to see their husbands for the last time before the guys were sent overseas. Women coming back from seeing their husbands, traveling with small children. Trying to feed their kids, diaper their kids. I felt sorriest for them. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t half as much fun as I’d been told it was going to be. I just thanked God I had no kids.’

Many children clung to parting memories of fathers from whom they became separated for years – in some cases forever. Little Californian Bernice Schmidt was nine when her parents got divorced. As a newly single man, her thirty-two-year-old father Arthur thus became eligible to be drafted. He was given leave from training camp before embarkation, and took his three children to a Los Angeles amusement park. He told them how homesick he was, and gave each a little parting present: Bernice’s was a pin in the shape of two hearts held together with an arrow, inscribed ‘Bernice, love daddy’. Pfc Schmidt was killed in action with the 317th Infantry on 15 November 1944. His daughter never forgot the day that news came, because it was her twelfth birthday. One day in October 1942, Nella Last was gazing at a neighbour’s children. Their mother touched her arm and asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’ Mrs Last said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Always be glad that your Ian is only seven.’ The woman said simply, ‘I
am
.’