How much did ordinary Germans really know about the Holocaust? by Leslie Wilson

'I know no one ever believes us nowadays – everyone thinks we knew everything. We knew nothing, it was all kept well secret.' Thus Brunhilde Pomsel, one of Goebbels's typists, recently quoted in The Guardian, talking about the Holocaust.

And I found myself, as so often, thinking: 'Yes, you can say that, but how can I believe you?' It was the eternal question for people of my generation, fuelled, often, by our parents' and grandparents's total silence or the repeated 'We didn't know anything about it.' It felt like banging your head against a brick wall.

'You didn't know what it was like!' my mother told me, furiously. She was right, and I've spent years trying to find out, and to imaginatively reconstruct what it might have been like for her, who was eight when Hitler came to power. She was wrong, though, when she told me it was nothing to do with me and I shouldn't try and form my own opinions about it. 'What one generation can't deal with,' a rabbi once told me about the Holocaust, 'they pass on to the next generation who must then wrestle with it.' It has been a long but necessary journey for many, both Jews and Germans and people of part-German descent, like me.

What my mother did once tell me was that she heard things, but she thought they were atrocity stories, such as were told about German soldiers during World War 1, and so people didn't believe them. I thought  then that she was talking about the gas chambers. She's dead now, and so it's too late to ask her for clarification on this, but the Holocaust had two stages, and this is a crucial factor to bear in mind.

 When the German Army went into Russia in June, 1941, they went with an agenda to wipe out huge amounts of people, Russians, but particularly Russian Jews. Police units, SS units, and ordinary soldiers in some cases, became what was called 'Einsatz' units, which I suppose you could translate as 'Action Units.' It was a euphemism, of course, for murder units. The involvement of ordinary servicemen was brought back into public consciousness in the '90s, when an exhibition called 'Crimes of the Wehrmacht' toured Germany to  demonstrations of support and howls of protest, but there is convincing evidence that these horrible massacres 'leaked' out to the general public. Soldiers came home and they talked, or, in some cases, boasted, as I made the Nazi lad next door boast to my heroine and her brother in 'Saving Rafael.'

They wrote home about it, like this man: 'About 2,007 of the 8,000 odd Jews of our (sic) little town have been shot at the command of the area commissar.. among them many women and children.' Another wrote this description of brutal reprisals after the Army had found captured German soldiers dead and mutilated in the cellar of the municipal law courts: 'Yesterday we and the SS were merciful, for every Jew we found was shot at once. Today it's different, since we found another 60 mutilated comrades. So now we made the Jews carry the dead up out of the cellar, lie them down nicely and then we showed them the disgusting crimes. After they had looked at the victims they were beaten to death with clubs and spades. We've already sent about 1,000 Jews into the other world.'
These letters passed the censor, so clearly, at this stage, nobody minded allowing the information to leak out.

monument to deported Jews, Berlin Grunewald station.

So it does seem inevitable that a fair proportion of Germans all over the country were aware of this phase of the Holocaust. Also Jews, including German Jews, were being murdered in the same way in Poland. Maybe this was what my mother meant when she spoke of 'atrocity stories'.

How much, though, were these stories at the forefront of ordinary Germans' minds at the time? From early 1942 onwards (the time when 'deportations' of German Jews really got going), the British began to target civilians in German cities. The effects (which went far beyond the war years) on urban populations of trauma, lack of sleep, and loss of their homes, can be imagined. There would also be a feeling of powerlessness. Yes, your Jewish neighbours, your doctor, and so on, might well have disappeared, but what could anyone do about it? And this was largely true, with a few exceptions. Powerlessness brings apathy in its train. Many people must have got on with their lives, focussing on their own survival and that of their families. 'Why should I care about the Jews?' one woman said. 'I've got enough to worry about, with my husband and brother at the Front.' If this sounds unpalatable or shocking, I can remember, on the day of the Chernobyl accident, going to collect my kids from school, shaken by what had happened, to hear the other mothers talking about new washing machines, and similar concerns. Humans have a staggering ability to ignore the bigger picture, which is why some British children were allowed to play in radioactive rain that day.


The second phase of the Holocaust was thought up following the secret Wannsee Conference, and in this context, it's worth considering a speech that Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, made to SS leaders in October 1943. 

'I also want to talk to you quite frankly about a very grave matter. We can talk about it among ourselves yet we will never speak of it publicly.. I am referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people.. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and - apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness - to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written..'

This speech is horribly fascinating for a variety of reasons; first, because he is referring to open-air massacres, which were widely known, and so he is persuading himself, and the SS (how successfully I have no idea) that nobody did know about them. Then, of course, one wonders what he means by 'remaining decent.' Perhaps retaining their allegiance to Nazism? It also demonstrates that even the SS found the murders repugnant - maybe just from squeamishness, or did they really have a vestige of conscience?There's that episode in 'Schindler's List' where the Jewish violinist, brought in to entertain the SS, deliberately plays a piece that he knows gets to one SS man's nerve. Eventually the man goes out and shoots himself. This would doubtless be one of the 'exceptions due to human weakness.'

Anyway, the methods of mass murder were overhauled. Firstly, because in fact increasing numbers of perpetrators did suffer PTSD. Secondly, because the corpses didn't stay in the mass graves.I won't go into details about that, but suffice it to say that normal decomposition didn't take place. You can read about it elsewhere if you want to. It's horrible.

And so the death camps were built, at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Birkenau, Majdankek,Chelmno; and new methods of murder dreamed up, along with huge ovens to get rid of the evidence. There was a lot of experimentation before prussic acid became the murder instrument of choice; putting people in vans and asphyxiating them with exhaust fumes was an early practice, which had already been tried out as part of the 'euthanasia' murders of disabled Germans. But from then on, the methods became more and more 'refined', and great efforts were made to keep the people unaware that they were about to be murdered.

It's vital to remember that the death camps were not the same as the concentration camps in Germany/Austria, terrible though such places were. There is a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was never used. The concentration camps, in Germany, Buchenwald, Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, Dachau etc, incarcerated criminals, gay people, some political prisoners, and some Jews, who were worked to death, also prisoners of war, particularly from the East. I have read people who should have informed themselves better saying: 'Oh, but didn't they realise about the gassings when they saw the smoke coming out of the chimneys; the people who lived near the camps must have known.' Well, the locals did realise what was going on, we're talking about Poland here. Auschwitz was the only camp which was a labour camp as well as a factory of death (that was the satellite Birkenau, carefully hidden behind trees). I think the confusion arises because, as is well known, large amounts of Jews from Auschwitz,  who were evacuated to the West, fetched up in these camps, Belsen being the horor everyone knows about. However, the horror of Belsen at the end of the war was different from the horrors of the extermination camps; except that its living skeletons and piles of corpses provided a potent image of the Nazi ideology of murder and death.


Secrecy was maintained about the operations of the death camps. The intention was to raze them after they'd done their work, so that nobody would ever know what had happened there. There were leaks of information: people listened to the BBC, who did talk about the destruction of the Jews, though as far as I know even they didn't give the full picture. If anyone knows better, please tell me. I have sat in the BBC written archive reading through the text of broadcasts to Germany. I remember reading about the attack on the Warsaw ghetto; and in the dazzling memoir of a Jewish German, the actor Michael Degen, who with his mother spent the war years in hiding in Berlin (Nicht alle waren Mörder; They Weren't All Murderers, alas not available in translation), he describes hearing the BBC talking about the exhaust gas murders, which was bad enough for a young lad to hear. He also describes another leakage of information, from a train driver who had driven many transports east, who'd witnessed the corpses falling out of the cattle trucks when the doors were opened, and whose son told Michael: 'Hitler has your people taken to Poland, by day and by night, and there they're gassed like cockroaches. They've built up a whole industry there.' To which the young Michael answered: 'You're crazy!'

The rails at Grunewald station, from which so many Berlin Jews went to their deaths.

I do remember reading somewhere - but I've forgotten the reference- that Jews managed to escape from transports and returned to Berlin, to beg the Jews still there to go underground and not to let themselves be taken east - but the Berlin Jews refused to believe them. This was also the case when the Polish diplomat Jan Karski came to the Allies during the war, to alert them to what was going on in Poland and ask for their support. As Clare Mulley told readers of this blog in  'Jan Karski, messenger from the past,' nobody wanted to do anything, but most tellingly: 'Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, possibly the most influential Jewish man in the USA, simply said he could not believe Karski’s report. When asked if he was suggesting that Karski was lying, Frankfurter replied only that not being able to believe was not the same as doubting the reliability of the source.' In other words, what he was expected to believe was so abominable that he simply couldn't take it in.

In the early 1980s, we were threatened with 'limited nuclear war' being waged in Europe.' A staggering amount of people simply blocked this out, and I can remember standing at a CND stall in the centre of Reading asking shoppers if they knew of any nuclear weapons establishments nearby. About 60% of those who'd agreed to be surveyed said they didn't, in spite of the presence in the neighbourhood of Greenham Common, Aldermaston, and Burghfield, to and from which nuclear bomb convoys still carry deadly payloads of weapons-grade plutonium. Many householders who lived close to the runway at Greenham loathed the Greenham women because they said they were affecting the value of their houses. The fact that they were living opposite to weapons that might (and nearly did on one occasion) bring about a nuclear holocaust and death to us all, didn't seem to bother them half as much as their house prices. But perhaps the reality was too ghastly for them to contemplate, too frighteningly alien, even. Humankind,as TS Eliot famously wrote, 'cannot bear very much reality.'

When I wrote both 'Saving Rafael' and 'Last Train from Kummersdorf', I made the knowledge of the mass shootings general, but the stories of the gas chambers something dreadful that my protagonists hoped wasn't true, and suffered when they discovered that it was. I think it's likely that many Germans, hearing, or hearing about, the BBC bulletins (and a phenomenal amount of Germans did listen to the BBC towards the end of the war, because it was the only reliable source of information about how things were going), simply blocked these stories out of their minds because they were too monstrous.

And perhaps they forgot that they'd blocked them out.

I was talking to a friend who grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia, and she told me that if you live in an atmosphere of lies, you become inclined to lie yourself (frequently as a matter of personal survival), and you end by believing the lies you tell.  Memory is not a recording device, which you can play back at will. Memories decay, are corrupted in storage, and false memories can be easily implanted (like the man who, in a famous experiment, was told that he was once lost in a supermarket as a child,  and ended up believing it and constructing his own story about it, though it never happened.

So the question of 'did they know', is a complicated one to answer. It could be better stated as 'was evidence available to them?' and 'did they choose not to know, and block it out?' or: 'Did they forget that they ever knew?'

In her memoir, written in the '80s, my mother wrote: 'In the face of incontrovertible evidence, my mind still refused to believe that any human being, least of all members of my own people, could be capable of such bestiality… In the end, and this is undoubtedly cowardice on my part, I closed my mind to anything that reminded me of what had happened in these camps because the thought of it filled me with such horror and revulsion that I became physically ill, unable to sleep or eat.'

And what does all this mean for us today? If we say 'Never again' about the Holocaust, we must consider what appalling things are going on nowadays, and be well aware of the blocking mechanisms that make us accept them. 'We need a strong economy' is one mantra deemed to be sufficient when we sell arms to regimes, such as the Saudi government, who are dropping British bombs on civilians and hospitals in Yemen. Every time I see an appeal for refugees, from reputable charities on Facebook, I see a rash of posts from people who say nobody should give money to refugees, even in camps thousands of miles away from Britain, because it is 'only encouraging them.' Such people have chosen to view all refugees as economic migrants, looking for a better life; it's easier, perhaps, than to face up to the enormous problem we're faced with, and the problems that the refugees themselves, more than anyone else, are faced with. And Trump, wanting to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the US, never mentions that the skewed economic systems that exploit the developing world are precisely what makes their citizens want to come to the countries who profit from their own countries' resources. Then there is climate change, a growing and lethal threat to all of us, and yet most of us do 'get on with their lives.' 'I have to drive my car,' we say, or: 'I must have a new smart-phone.' Yet someone, or some part of our world, too often pays a terrible price for our impulse-purchase or bargain clothing, and one day we too will pay.

Monument to a transport of Jews, Grunewald station

The mechanisms of denial are a survival mechanism, as Eliot pointed out, but they have enormous destructive power as well. Yes, we must be able to give ourselves comfort zones, for the sake of our humanity. Yet what we need also is to regularly emerge from these, as we emerge from our homes, see what is going on in the world outside, and take what action we can.




All photographs by David Wilson

Why weren't all the Germans like Maria von Maltzan? By Leslie Wilson

Nazi boycott of Jewish shops. Photo: German Federal Archive

One month after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag building went up in flames. The arson was blamed on Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist, and he was executed for it a year later. It seems that most historians agree that van der Lubbe did set the building on fire - but what is beyond doubt is that it was a great opportunity for Hitler, who persuaded the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg, to suspend civil liberties. In the aftermath, Communists and Social Democrats were arrested, tortured and imprisoned. Some of them never emerged from the 'wild' concentration camps the SA (Brownshirts) set up. Some of them never got so far. The Social Democrat Minister-President of Mecklenburg, Johannes Stelling, was tortured to death and his body was tied up in a sack and thrown into a river. Twelve other Social Democrats were thrown in the same night. Paul Löbe, the former President of the Reichstag, was kidnapped, arrested, and put into a camp. Social Democratic councillor and officials in Braunschweig resigned their posts when they were threatened with violence; one refused and was beaten to death, and this pattern was repeated across Germany. Trades Unions and other 'Marxist' organisations (like the Schrader League that my grandfather had belonged to) were dissolved, often after the premises had been trashed and the administrators beaten or murdered.

And of course, the Nazis began to attack the Jews. Maria von Maltzan, a young German aristocrat, reponded to the boycott of Jewish businesses (which happened in April 1933), in characteristic fashion: 'Posters were fixed to Jewish shops with the words: 'Germans, don't buy from Jews!' I couldn't resist just going into such a little shop, with uniformed boycott supervisors standing in front of it. They stopped me at once and asked what I wanted to buy.' She told them she wanted to pay a bill. Once she was inside, the shopkeeper, an elderly Jewish woman, said to her: ''For God's sake, you're putting yourself in pointless danger!' Maltzan's response was: 'I hadn't thought of that for a moment.'

Maria von Maltzan, from book jacket

Maria von Maltzan was an exceptional person, stubborn, and if not fearless, a risk-taker. One can imagine how easily other people would be deterred by the heavies standing outside the Jewish business, particularly since they probably knew exactly what they were capable of. However, even Maltzan quickly realised that she did need to be careful. The Gestapo interrogated her as a communist sympathiser and a friend of Jews. Possibly she was saved from the worst by her aristocratic status and her father's reputation as a German war hero. Nevertheless, she soon learned that as a person involved in resistance, she couldn't be cautious enough.

And once she had achieved her doctorate in natural history, in Munich, she couldn't apply for any posts in research establishments or biological institutes, because such posts were reserved for Nazi party members, and she wouldn't join the Party.

I have been reading a book which I can't praise enough: Richard J Evans's 'The Third Reich in History and Memory.' It is a collection of essays, elegantly and accessibly written, and in the essay entitled: 'Coercion and Consent', he considers and rebuts the contention of historians that the vast majority of the German people supported Hitler and that an extensive apparatus of terror wasn't necessary.

This is based on the observation that the Gestapo, as an organisation, was far smaller than the Stasi in the so-called 'German Democratic Republic', and that after 1933 the concentration camps (as opposed to the death camps in the East) were used for criminals and 'anti-social elements.' However, these historians are ignoring the role of the courts in prosecuting anyone who stepped out of line, and many of these people ended up in prisons and penitentiaries.

This struck an immediate chord with me, having sat one afternoon in the German historical Institute reading reports from a German court (I think it was Hamburg). The example that stuck in my mind was the man who had joked in an air-raid shelter that Hitler had invaded France to get back his ball, which had been shot off in the First World War. The story about Hitler's missing ball was of course commonplace in Britain, and perhaps the man had got it from secretly listening to the BBC. In any case, he got a hefty prison sentence, and there were many other such cases.

In 1935, 23,000 inmates of state prisons and penitentiaries were classified as political offenders. Others were just guillotined. Contrary to what David Cesarani claimed in the Letters Page of the Guardian when 'Alone in Berlin' was published, the judicial murder of the elderly couple in Fallada's book was far from exceptional.

Ploetzensee prison Berlin: photo ThoKay

When, shortly before her death, I asked my grandmother what it was like to live under the Nazis, she glanced over her shoulder before she answered; so I saw the 'German glance', which her contemporaries in the West had been able to abandon. My grandmother's ongoing mental illness, her hours of brooding and inner anguish, had preserved it intact. What she remembered, first and foremost, from living under the Nazis, was fear. She told me then about Nazi women coming to the house and inspecting everything and then saying: 'You're scum. You'll end up in concentration camp.' That must have been in 1933, when my grandfather was fighting for his job. However, the 'German glance' was necessary, if you were going to say anything incautious, in a world where the Nazi surveillance apparatus extended to the lowest level officials, the 'Blockwart' whose job it was to collect and transfer information about everyone living in his small area. Nazi womens' organisations, schools, and the Hitler Youth, all kept tabs on the population. Bruno Bettelheim undoubtedly had this in mind when he remarked that the whole of Germany was a concentration camp.

Maria von Maltzan couldn't take up the career she wanted because of her political views; other people were threatened with the loss of their jobs if they stepped out of line. My grandfather was one of millions controlled by their jobs (he also had a mentally-ill wife and I would think her safety, every time she was taken into mental hospital, was guaranteed by his being a senior police officer. If he had been a dissident, she might have been murdered as so many patients were.) Nazism was no different from any other totalitarian state; people were controlled through their jobs.

Of course there were people who were enthusiastic about the Nazi state. The unpleasant refugee Czekalla in my novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf,' talks big about killing people in Russia, and finally mutters that he was meant to be a big landlord out there. Some people will go along with all kinds of abuses for personal benefit - and the Nazi system made it its business to bring out the worst that the human race is capable of. Brutality, racial hatred, callousness, were promoted as virtues in Nazi Germany. Sebastian Haffner, in his 'Defying Hitler' describes how he and his fellow lawyers were taken off to a kind of boot camp and given military training. (this seems to have been standard practice, with professionals) 'It was remarkable,' he observed, 'how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilisation.' We all know that soldiers commit horrific crimes, both off their own bat, or because they are told to. In his study of German police units who were taken off to murder Jews, Christopher Browning shows how powerful the sense of peer pressure was, in persuading the policemen not to step out, where the option of doing so was given them. ''Who would have dared,' one policeman declared emphatically, to 'lose face' before the assembled troops.' It's a situation I explored in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' where the lad Hanno tells the girl Effi how his friends were tormenting an old Jewish man, and he walked away from it - and felt guilty afterwards.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

I once gave a talk to a group of schoolchildren about how people could be brought to participate in mass murders, and when I told them about this, the boys, in particular, all nodded reluctantly, and understood exactly what I was talking about. It's what happens in the playground when children are bullied, and I don't think I'm trivialising it when one considers that bullied children often kill themselves.

However, one must also remember that one motive for establishing the 'controlled' situation of the extermination camps and the gas chambers was that the troops who had been carrying out killings were getting post-traumatic stress disorder, which suggests that they did have some kind of conscience about committing murder. And also, the men who stepped out of murder duty were often self-employed, and didn't feel they needed to worry about their future work prospects after the war.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying: 'Oh, yes, but you're fuzzing ethical issues. People are always responsible for their actions.'

And this, according to Richard Evans, is a key issue. 'Anything that implies constraints on the free will of historical actors puts a potentially serious obstacle in the way of establishing their culpability.' In other words, if one questions the validity of the 'consent' of ordinary Germans to Hitler, one provides perpetrators with the excuse that they acted under duress, which could get them off in the courtroom.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can see the ethical problem. It seems to me, though, that those men who took part in the murders of Jews in eastern Europe definitely did commit murder. And if you have done such a thing, it cannot be changed, even if you acted through fear, or, in the case of the younger men, were so conditioned by propaganda and bad teaching that you had no ethical equipment to stop you doing this. You've still done something bad and it cannot be undone. But I think the greater responsibility lies with the people who planned for this to happen.

The idea of willing Nazi supporters, about a nation who were eager to invade other countries (in fact the initial response to the outbreak of war was largely fear and gloom) has been a part of the story the British have been telling themselves about the war for the whole of my life. A few years ago, I went with a Jewish friend to watch the documentary about Belsen which appalled the British when it was shown after the war (it's not easy to watch now, either). The commentator said: 'If you hadn't fought the war, this might have been you.' (It wasn't at any stage stated that the poor people in the camp and the mass graves were mainly Jewish.)

mass grave, Bergen-Belsen. Photo Lieutenant Alan Moore

The fact that the Germans were deemed to be particularly monstrous, peculiarly inhumane and cruel, gave extra lustre to the war that had been fought against them, and undoubtedly made people feel their sufferings had been worth while.

There's something else, though. If you discount the fact that Nazism was a terror state - and I still hear people and read people doing so, even nowadays - it may be a reassurance. 'They' were different, 'they' came from a corrupt culture. If you assert that Nazism could have been fought by simple acts of refusal (there were quite a few, and many of them ended in the deaths of the dissidents), then naturally, it couldn't possibly happen anywhere else, like here. I think that's a very dangerous illusion. If we are convinced, for example, that British people wouldn't stand for that kind of thing, we may ignore the fact that similar structures of surveillance and criminalisation of dissent are being set up, not hypothetically, but now, as I am typing these words.

I think the danger in Britain is not of a sudden slashing clampdown, as in 1933 in Germany, but a slow creeping paralysis that makes it harder and harder for anyone to dissent. Where that may lead is hard to tell because no more than Germans in 1933 are we capable of looking at history from the other end and seeing what is going to happen. However, just consider that people who oppose fracking have recently been described by Tory politicians as 'extremists.' I will say no more.

Nazi Germany: The Nightmare Begins, by Leslie Wilson

photo: German Federal Archive

Here are Hitler's Storm Troopers, marching triumphantly after he was made Chancellor of Germany on the 30th January, 1933. That evening, the young man who became the distinguished writer Sebastian Haffner, (his real name was Raimund Pretzel), read the headline: 'Cabinet of National Unity formed - Hitler Reichschancellor.'

His first reaction was 'icy horror'. Then he sat down with his father to discuss it. 'We agreed that it had a good chance of doing a lot of damage, but not much chance of surviving very long.. Even with the Nazis, this government would not have a majority in the Reichstag.'
In fact, only three members of the cabinet were Nazis, and Hitler could be dismissed at any time by the Reich President. So though opponents of Hitler were dismayed, they could see reasons for optimism.

Hilary Mantel has observed that we tend to see history backwards, ie, we know how the story ends, and cannot imagine how the people concerned could fail to see it. But history at the point of unfolding (if you can call it a point, since it is always unfolding) is murky, confusing, and uncertain.This observation is particularly relevant when people look at the Third Reich, an area of history where the desire to exhibit moral correctness frequently trumps objectivity.

What I mean by that is that there is an emotionally-motivated tendency to simplistically divide people into goodies and baddies, even now. I am the last person to dismiss the reality of feeling when looking at the Nazi period and its crimes. My family was too deeply involved and scarred. At the same time, the desire to apportion blame (and therefore somehow to achieve the moral high ground onesself) can distort one's comprehension of those events - and even historians all too often exhibit this tendency.

Looking back now, it seems to me that the four weeks following the 30th January represented a tiny window of opportunity (maybe more of a cat-flap of opportunity) when Germany could have averted Nazi rule. The normal judicial processes were still technically intact; Hitler did not have a majority in the Reichstag, as Haffner and his father observed. Goering had yet to perfect the apparatus of repression, and leftist leaders were still (just) alive and free.

Nor did Hitler have the majority of Germans on his side. The Nazi share of the vote had actually fallen, from 37% to 33% in the November 1932 election. In fact, the Social Democrats and Communists together had 37% of the vote, and could easily have trumped the Nazis, if they could have worked together. But the Communists had their own aims and parliamentary democracy was not one of them.
To the right-wing, aristocratic and elitist parties, typified by the Reich President, the ageing Paul von Hindenburg, the Communists were a horror, and so they plumped for Hitler, believing they could neutralise him. It has to be said that, looking at the near future, civil war was a very alarming possibility; the Nazis and the Communists were already fighting it out on the streets, and so the right wing decided that to take the Nazi leader into the government, under their control (as they believed), was far the safest option.

Sebastian Haffner: Wikimedia Commons

'How could things turn out so completely differently?' Sebastian Haffner reflected, writing in 1939, when the catastrophe of war was already on the doorstep. 'Perhaps it was just because we were all so certain that they could not do so' (ie turn out as they did) '-and relied on that with far too much confidence.'

This is not to say there weren't signs of what was to come. In what the Nazis called 'the national uprising' the storm troopers attacked their opponents, in particular the Left and Jews, and this began on the night of the 30th January, after the torchlight procession.

Berndt Roesel, 1925

I wonder what my grandfather, a young policeman in Silesia, felt on the 30th January 1933? I'd have thought that 'icy horror' would be about right. He belonged to a Social Democratic police association and had refused to join a Nazi one; he had freely said that he couldn't understand how anyone could belong to the Nazi party, least of all a policeman. He knew exactly what the Nazis were, and what they were capable of; brutal thugs, whose riots he'd had to try and keep in order, and if he stopped his men from joining in and beating them up, it was only because of his respect for the law. Immediately post 30th January, though, he still had enough faith in the law to argue with a Nazi-inclined colleague  that a Communist demonstration that had happened locally had been authorised and legal, and should not have been stopped just because there was now a Nazi chancellor.

The issue of legality is maybe why there was no effective resistance to Hitler during those weeks between the 30th of January and the Reichstag fire of the 27th of February, after which terror was unleashed. Hitler was in power as part of Parliamentary process; he had been appointed by the President. To take up arms against him, if you weren't an extremist, would have meant civil war. Ordinary, law-abiding people had had enough of the pitched battles on the streets, the attacks on passers-by, the smashed windows and flying bullets. The last thing they wanted was to escalate the disorder.

Also, nothing quite like Nazi rule had happened before - or not for a long time, at least.The monarchical Prussian/German state, whatever criticisms one may make of it, was largely a state of legality, and even the monarchs were subject to the law. Many Germans - including many Jewish Germans - felt that Hitler would be tamed, his excesses muted, by the responsibility of government and the sheer weight of state structures.


And during those all-too short four weeks between Hitler's rise to chancellorship and the Reichstag fire, people had their own lives to get on with, that tangle of private worries, personal exhaustion, busyness, confusion, and often powerlessness. They had no idea of how short the time was, perhaps never even knew what the opportunity was that they were losing.
I think history is the slow movement forwards of trillions of moments in the lives of the human race: babies are born, fed, cleaned up and winded, washing is done and hung out to dry; a million men and women come home from work, having spent a day servicing the machinery of a world that is maybe heading for disaster; documents are signed that will put thousands of people off their traditional lands (or expedite the deaths of six million Jews), and then the cleaners move in and exhaustedly mop up behind the 'important' people. . You remember something you need for tonight's dinner and get in the car, thus adding your mite to the carbon already in the atmosphere. Or, on a more cheerful note, you decide to walk or bike instead, and thus you don't.
The history of the world is the story of real life in all its mundanity and unclarity, when what is happening to you, what you hear on the news has happened to other people, has not yet got its name and been assigned a page in the history books. It is raw and new. I think novelists and biographers have a unique opportunity to portray this, since we write about how individual humans live history.It's certainly what I tried to do, when I was writing Last Train from Kummersdorf.

 

This is a first instalment; next month I'll be writing about what happened after the Reichstag fire.



 

WRITING LAST TRAIN FROM KUMMERSDORF - A LITTLE BIT OF MY SOUL, by Leslie Wilson

My novel 'Last Train from Kummersdorf' will be reissued  next month, and it made me think about its inception and the ingredients that went into it. I'd started to write it seven years before it was actually published, and it was a very different book then.

I began to write it because:
I went to see 'Schindler's List' and the images of heaped-up personal goods from murdered Jews suddenly fired up such fury and rage in me, I knew it would have to find an outlet in writing.
Because I read about the Battle of Berlin, how in the last stages lads as young as twelve were drafted in to fight, and the SS shot these kids if they cracked and begged to go home.
Because my mother is German, and one day - I think we were looking at an episode of 'Heimat' together - the Nazi Horst Wessel song was played and she began to sing along with apparent pleasure. I was horrified, but to her it was just a bit of her youth, and she didn't even connect it with the horrors of a society that had threatened both her parents' lives.
Because though I adored her when I was small, I found it harder and harder to understand her as I grew up, and I hoped, through finding out and writing about childhood in Nazi Germany, to somehow get to understand her.
So it was about things that I found intolerable, incomprehensible - and really needed to understand, because your mother is part of you, in a way.
I began with the boy, Hanno. He was the hardest to write. He's fourteen (almost fifteen) and he's been drafted into the 'Volkssturm', the Home Guard, to fight against the incoming Russians. This was an organisation that was largely characterised by the phrase in Henry Reed's 'Naming of Parts,' 'which in our case we have not got.' Hanno's entire unit has been wiped out around him, including his twin brother (I couldn't have done this now, not since the birth of my twin grandsons). Aching with loss, cut off from his mother and sister - who have fled to the West to escape the Russians - Hanno has no idea where to go or what to do now. In that state, he meets Effi.

Effi is a mass of prickles, and Hanno can't understand why she's so hostile to him, but they stay together, at first just because it's better than being completely alone. She is the daughter of a political refugee from Nazism, and got marooned in Germany when her mother insisted on coming back to be with her own mother, who was dying. The war broke out before they could get back, and then Effi's mother died of TB. Effi then went to her aunt, who was part of the Communist resistance to Hitler, and remained with her till she was also killed by a bomb. Now she is trying to cross the battle zone and get to the US army, because she knows her father is with them.

In writing about Effi's life in the then working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg, I owe an enormous debt to Bernt Engelmann, whose two books of mixed autobiography and oral history (published in Britain as 'In Hitler's Germany' told me about that left-wing resistance. I'd had no idea about it; I suppose the Cold War led to its suppression, so that all most people in England know about is the attempted coup of July 1944. But Communists and Social Democrats did what they could; admittedly, it wasn't much, but it included sabotage of munitions factories, at enormous risk, by those who worked there, getting Jews and others at risk out of Germany, and also reporting on conditions in the country.
Effi has learned to keep her mouth shut, and has a very different perspective on things from Hanno's - and of course, she wasn't difficult to write at all, because I could put my own thoughts and feelings on the page through her. She's jazz-obsessed, uses music as a way to get along in a dreadfully dangerous world. She carries a bag of things that might be useful to sell after the war's ended, and a harmonica which she uses to express her feelings, to torment other people when she feels like it. My brother sent me Sonny Terry's 'Freight Train rolling', so I could hear how Effi might imitate a train when she and Hanno are selling fake tickets. When she wants to be nice to Hanno, she calls him 'Swing Boy,' and promises him a great life when everything's over, listening to hitherto forbidden jazz. She wants to be a singer and have a lion, like Josephine Baker. She isn't callous, but she's tough, a survivor - I think it was good for me to write her.

Hanno from the hardback jacket

Hanno was the difficult proposition, but he was the reason I wrote the book, to try and understand what it was like to see the world through the lens of Nazi lies, I was enormously helped by my tai chi teacher, whose father was persecuted in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia, who told me: 'You didn't have the language to see that things could be different.' At university, we had a unit in History of the German Language on the language of propaganda in the Nazi period. I found it really fascinating, I think because there were things in it that spoke to me subliminally, from my family background. It chimed in with what the 'Eighties women's movement pointed out, that society can gag people by withholding the means to name what is going on. Hanno was very young, younger than my mother, when Hitler came to power, and the Nazi society is all he has really known. Effi - often brutally - forces him to understand the reality behind the lies and the glorification of inhumanity.
My mother was on the run, in the open, in April 1945, as some readers of this blog know, escaping from Russians who'd tried to rape her. When that trauma, which she repressed for many years, came back to her, I was a young child. I can remember it well, because she had nobody but the family to talk to, and I, as well as my father, became her therapists. I've met other people who found themselves, as children, the only available people to listen to their parents' trauma. I can see why it happened, but of course she shared the horror with me, which is perhaps why I feel partly as if I had experienced these things. It's a common phenomenon known to therapists, who call it 'reverse transference', I think. I've written about second generation trauma before on this blog, so shan't go on about it now.

I heard that my mother had seen a man crucified on his own barn door for trying to stop the Russians raping his wife and daughter; she also told me about a child of eleven or twelve who was haemorrhaging to death because she'd been gang-raped. That dreadful image haunted me, and even now, I can't write it without crying. I was able to give it expression in the novel when Effi exclaims about a child who has been raped: 'That little Barbara, what has she done?' - If you want to hear more details of what the Russians did to German women and children, there are plenty of sources. Me, I've never been able to read the sections of Anthony Beevor's 'Berlin, the Downfall' that deal with rape. Or the diary of the unknown Berlin woman that is now published in English and so many people have told me about. The challenge was to write about the rapes without going into too much horrible detail, and I got the image that would carry the horror without being explicit, in an account by a Russian officer, Lev Kopelev (who was himself horrified at this crime - not all of the Russians raped) of a child with blood streaking down her stockings.

The other issue was how you survive, when you're on the edge, in the open, with very little to eat. It was a situation my mother knew all too well, from the post-war period. You barter. You filch, even. You forage if you can, but in springtime, there's not much to eat except nettles. If a horse is killed, it's valuable meat. And every bit of food counts.
The crucial difference between the 'adult' version and the 'Young Adult' version, was determined by what happened in between the initial drafts and when I took the book up again. I had gone to Berlin and read my grandfather's file. Rachel Seiffert, in her debut novel 'The Dark Room,' writes about a grandson who sets out to discover the truth about a beloved, kindly, grandfather. It turns out that he was involved in the murder of Jews in Russia.

Shortly after reading that book, I investigated my grandfather's file. He was an authoritarian, angry man, and frankly, I could always imagine him involved in incredible brutality. I expected to make a similar exposé; but in fact, what I found was the story of his persecution in 1933, and the only evidence regarding an atrocity was the underlining (in red ink) by a British investigator of a demand to know why he had not come back to his regiment at a certain date. I do still feel that when my brother and I were told that our grandfather had 'seen terrible things', it probably means that he also did them.
All the same, reading his file made me understand the pressure that there was on him to conform; that Germany under Hitler was truly a terror society. And just before I began to rewrite the novel, I was volunteering for the Refugee Support Group in my home town, and the stories I heard from refugees drove it home that those of us who condemn people who went along with the Nazis should be grateful they haven't had to make those kinds of choices. None of us knows what we'd do in a terror state; and it's not just an issue of onesself, but of the people who depend on one. 'I could have resisted,' my grandfather told my mother after the war, 'but there was you, and your mother to consider.'
The line between victim and perpetrator is not anything like as finely drawn as we'd like to believe - and I apologise to anyone who's read me saying this before on this blog. And so the novel's tone changed, very importantly, I think. It was no longer the vehicle for sheer anger (why did my grandparents' generation load up my generation with all this guilt and shame?) and really became a journey to understanding. If what I came to understand was bitter and dreadful, I think it has made me stronger.It was a great help that I actually went and walked round the area, with a reluctant teenage daughter in tow, when I first started to write, making notes about terrain, trees, plants, soil, animals and birds. I must assure my readers that I did give her a nicer time in our other days in Berlin, and she was glad she'd come with me - though not glad she'd had to trudge round those Zossen woods.

the pond where Effi and Hanno go fishing?

Things I enjoyed about writing the book: that knowledge of the place, which made it vivid to me, and, thank goodness, to my readers as well, as the many responses to it have shown me. The black humour, drawing on the jokes people told at the time. The music. The dog, Cornelius, who did magical things while behaving exactly as dogs do.
And however dreadful the events that surround this novel are, it turned out to be about hope, and new growth with a new generation; and about unexpected humanity and humour, love, even, in bad places. People often ask authors which is their favourite book, and I am usually cagey about replying; but Last Train from Kummersdorf is my favourite book, and I feel privileged to have been able to write it.

Last Train from Kummersdorf will be published by Faber and Faber on the 7th May

MUSIC WHILE YOU WORK, by Leslie Wilson

Music affects me in two ways when I’m writing. Firstly, there’s the music that actually occurs in the novel – a lot of Django Reinhart and Louis Armstrong in Last Train from Kummersdorf . When I was writing Saving Rafael, I had a cd called ‘Berlin by Night’ which contained popular music from Germany in the Nazi period. Not, I hasten to add, Nazi songs, but songs ranging from ‘Lili Marleen’ to disguised jazz, given a German title and lyric to make it more acceptable to the authorities. It has ‘Es geht Alles Vorüber’, the smash hit of the end of the war, the one that people played over and over again. Its message: ‘Everything passes, everything goes by, and every December is followed by May’ annoyed Propaganda Minister Goebbels – not martial enough – but that made no difference. My mother associated it, bitterly, with the letter she got telling her her first love had been killed in action – but she did have her Maytime after all, when she met my British father.

I listened to that cd over and over again, and composed the ‘theme lyric’ for the novel, in slight imitation of a terribly shlocky number that had me frankly laughing my head off. Jenny, in the novel, knew it was trash, but because it was playing the first time she realised Raf was interested in her, it got terribly important to her.
And yet – the scene where my young hero reaches across the table and starts playing with Jenny’s fingers comes, not from any of those contemporaneous songs, but from Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto (in D Major, I believe). I’d been wondering how to write that scene just before I was taken abruptly into hospital to have a tumour taken out of my spine. The second night after my surgery, I had a dreadful moment when I woke up and thought: ‘Somebody’s in pain,’ and then realised it was me – just as authors describe in many novels, and I always thought they’d made it up! But the thing that made me cry was that I thought I’d lost my novel. I got some more opiates from the nurses, calmed myself down – they were dealing with an emergency in the room and the last thing they needed was an author agonising – and then the next morning I was listening to the Tchaikowsky on my personal stereo and suddenly I was in the Café Kranzler again. I’d found the novel! Such a relief, because honestly, it was an awful moment, and I realised how important a companion the novel I’m working on is to me.
Tchaikowsky wrote the concerto as a love-letter to a young violinist – who didn’t reciprocate his affection – but it is the most passionate, flirtatious, wonderful bit, and the part of the slow movement I was listening to was just like someone playing with their loved one’s fingers. I had something to write on, so I reached out – I had to lie flat in bed – and scrawled it down.
There’s a jazz cd by Abdullah Ibrahim called ‘Water from an Ancient Well’ that my brother gave me, that I played over and over again while I was writing Kummersdorf.
 Music so often releases something in me, and it’s vitally important to me for that reason. I can’t imagine writing without music. If I didn’t have any of the machines that are our personal musicians nowadays, I’d have to sing for myself, or relearn to play the piano and play every morning, as Jane Austen did. Perhaps that would be better, who knows?
But I’m a twentieth/twenty-first century writer, though I write historical fiction. My childish imagination was fired by ‘Music and Movement’ and by the stacks of wonderful glossy records, ‘78s, that lived in our house in Kendal – my parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I guess these were left over from a YMCA jumble sale, since my Dad worked for the YM and the house was a YM house. We lived over the office. Anyway, I have wonderful memories of my brother and me, on wet Lake District days, putting on The Night on Bald Mountain, and dancing excitedly to it. And that music surfaced years later when I wrote my novel about a witch persecution in the 17th century, Malefice. 

(HOW) DARE WE WRITE HISTORICAL NOVELS? by Leslie Wilson

David Starkey has announced in various media that Wolf Hall is a 'deliberate perversion of history', (though he has neither read the books nor seen the television adaptation so I do wonder how he can assert this). Someone, however, has told him that Mark Rylance, playing Thomas Cromwell, is portrayed as showing grief when his wife and daughters are carried off in a day by the sweating sickness. 'I gather Hilary Mantel has imagined this wonderful tender experience of Thomas Cromwell losing wife and children,' he says, and 'there is not a scrap of evidence for it at all.'


Not all historians hate historical fiction, and many of them are hugely generous towards fiction writers  - I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Michael Biddiss, for one, who referred me to several useful texts on Nazi Germany and particularly to the invaluable documentary history of Nazism by J Noakes and G Pridham - so helpful, particularly when I was writing Saving Rafael. However, much as I respect and value historians, I do not need their permission to write my fictions.
The thing is (Doctor Starkey), that a novel set in the past is not an easy-read alternative to a history book (however carefully we do our research, and some of us, notably Dame Hilary, do it very carefully indeed. Indeed Hilary Mantel's work is widely respected by historians). The term historical fiction may perhaps be a tripwire here. We are writers of fiction, and some of us choose to write about historical subjects.That means that we apply our imagination to those subjects, which is what writers do, and of course we go to places (like someone's probable response to a bereavement) that historians must in honesty hold back from.
In exactly the same way, I might write a story about someone, say, who is a teacher in a North of England town. There is no evidence that such a character exists or that any given human being ever behaved exactly as this character did. If I cannot find it, it is not incumbent in me to leave it out, because the job of a writer is to say: 'What if? Supposing?' It is to write a story.

My grandmother in the '30s

Actually, I researched the novels I set in Nazi Germany very carefully, but this was because my enterprise was to understand what it was like to be a person who had to live in Nazi Germany. That is - as readers of my blogs here will readily understand - something very important to me. The enormous amount of reading I have done about the period, as well as watching videos, talking to people who remembered those times, reflecting on the things that came to me from my own family, was not directed at making my works good textbooks for Year 9s. Some people have found them so, but what drove me was that need to open a window for myself on twelve dreadful years that marked and scarred my immediate family as well as damaging and bereaving millions of others.

In the end, though, it came down to 'What if? Supposing?' Supposing one of the boy soldiers who were drafted into the German Home Guard in 1945 was the sole survivor of his unit; supposing he met a girl on the run from Berlin, who had a very different background; supposing the interaction and relationship between them changed both of them as they trod the refugee road with the fighting going on round them? Supposing  the girl was jazz-crazy, and could play the harmonica, and supposing a fantasy grew legs and desperate people started to believe it? Then you get Last Train from Kummersdorf.

There's another idea about historical fiction that is popular among the chattering classes, even post Wolf Hall. It is that it is somehow tacky, chocolate-boxy, that the proper enterprise of novelists is to describe the present day (preferably grittily). Now I have no objection to grit, but there was just as much of it around in the past - and indeed there is a whole generation of excellent novels that deal with the undersides of history, some written by fellow-contributors to this blog. 

One of my history teachers at school took this line: she said we should avoid historical fictions, which were always misleading and trashy, and concentrate on fiction written at the time we were studying. Maybe she would have liked to have a go at the English literature syllabus and excise such trashy works as Henry IV Part One, (which I studied for A Level). Also, she must have despised such trivial works as War and Peace, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Vanity Fair, all of Shakespeare's History plays, Büchner's Danton's Death, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (which I first saw, incidentally, at Kendal Grammar School with my brother as one of the Women of Canterbury and David Starkey in the star role. The poetry blew me away.)

If the past is another country, it's one that is part of our present. Humans have many means of visiting it and trying to inhabit it; through histories, biography, visiting historical sites, and drama, in which I include the novel. To talk about, mythologise, and speculate on the past is part of what it means to be human, and that makes it a valid subject for literature.

IT WAS OFTEN QUITE DIFFICULT TO GET CREAM by Leslie Wilson

I have been reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir 'Slipstream' and read about an American who told her, in 1946, that 'we had our small privations, too, you know. It was often quite difficult to get cream.'

Britain queues for food: photo, Imperial War Museum

I can imagine her returning to Britain and telling her friends about this, and their slightly indignant laughter, as they contemplated what they saw as their miserly rations.
Meanwhile my mother was living on the outskirts of Cologne on boiled turnips, bread bulked out with sawdust, and any nettles she could scavenge; once, on a railway journey to try and find out what had become of my grandfather, who had been arrested by the Allies and had disappeared without trace, she saw a really fat man and wondered how he could be so fat on the rations. She fantasized about cutting slices off him and frying them. When my father's mother, who was living in Canada, sent her and my grandmother a gift parcel, they were thrilled to have the egg-powder the British hated so much, dried milk, and flour, to make into pancakes and fry, using cod-liver-oil from the capsules Grandma-in-Canada had sent.
When I was a child, and English people complained about the privations of the war, she snorted to herself. When she came to England to marry my father, the rations that the British found so penitential were so much too rich for her that she kept being sick in shop doorways. In spite of having a naturally round face, one can see from this photograph that she was in very poor physical shape on her wedding day.

Some people have said in my hearing that the Germans deserved to starve, given what they had inflicted on so many other people. However, for one thing, those who committed the crimes were not always those who suffered for them (like the children who died like flies) and for another, this was the state of not just Germans, but people all over Europe in the aftermath of the war. To be fair, many people in Britain were well aware of their state of relative privilege.
I cannot help echoing my mother's snort when I read of British people 'suffering' from lack of sugar and sweets in and after wartime (for I really think it is obscene to call that suffering when people in concentration camps were being killed by starvation). However,I am not writing this in order to lambast British complaints of hardship - though reading yesterday's post on this blog, they seem to have become so inventive and resourceful, they should have been grateful, maybe? What I'm interested in here is the uneven texture of hardship during the war, even within nations.
For example, I have written, in my novels for teenagers, about the meagre rations of the German population at the end of the war, basing it on historical evidence and first-person accounts. However, it was well known that if you were a 'hohes Tier' (high-up, literally, 'higher animal', you could get anything you wanted, right up to the end, and these things were available on the black market. The train stuffed full of goodies in Last Train from Kummersdorf is similarly based on actual historical fact, and anyone who reads an account of the last days of the shower of criminals in the Berlin bunker can see that they were fed fat.
My mother told me that right up to the end of the war, they didn't go short in Austria, and even afterwards they still had enough to eat, though my father helped, by not only sharing his Army rations with them, but also by deploying his country skills, snaring rabbits and hares and fishing the streams around Graz.
It wasn't until she and my grandmother were deported back to Germany that they really began to starve. I haven't done any research into Austria during and immediately after the war, so was it that my grandmother was quite good at the black market, or that Austria managed to get a better food supply than other nations, or just that the starvation of the time in Germany was so dreadful that relative scarcity, looking back, came to look like a good supply of food? I don't think so, because this photograph, taken by my father in Graz in 1945, shows my mother looking very well fed - I think, however, the double chin is only due to her leaning her head back when the photo was taken, because she was always slim.

Farmers, of course, did OK, and another story my mother told me was about the farmers boasting that they would soon be able to lay down Persian carpets in the cowsheds, as starving town-dwellers bartered their valuables for milk, and so on.
But farmers generally do OK. My father-in-law, apparently, who was an agricultural engineer, used to be part-paid by the farmers for his work with butter, eggs, and so on, and thus never had much difficulty with rations. It helped that he married a farmer's daughter in 1945.
My great-aunt Mia and her husband August, had a textile factory (she ran it and he did as she told him, though it was technically his) and so my mother never went short of nice clothes, at a time when a German creative writing student of mine had to wear dresses made from flour sacks and tie her hair up with string. When my father, by contrast, made a blunder the first time he asked my mother out, by inviting her to the opera, and it turned out to be the ballet, she was shamed by being drastically over-dressed, in a silk dress with her hair tied up with a broad velvet ribbon. Anyone who's read Saving Rafael will recognise the source of Uncle Hartmut's textile factory, and his wife's supply of luxury fabrics. Connections were what mattered - it is always a mistake to assume that what one set of people experienced was typical of the entire population in wartime.
(Aspiring historical novelists, please take note! And do re-read Eleanor Updale's excellent post on this blog about the hazards of assuming that any given period would only have the clothes and furniture produced in that period!)
Unfortunately, I haven't got a photo of my mother's opera-going costume, but it's a pretty nice dress my mother is wearing in these pictures, again taken when my parents were courting in Austria. (The first one is my favourite photograph of them together, by the way) The quality of the print speaks for itself, and it looks like silk. I'm sure it came from Aunt Mia, who once gave my mother a finely-pleated silk skirt that you could crumple up as much as you liked, but it would still come out nice. And see the lovely muff and the velvet-collared coat in the previous photograph.

I did read a novel for teenagers recently that suggested that there was quite severe rationing in the States during the war, something similar to what Britain had, and I found it very hard to believe. I had read so many accounts, in fact and fiction written at the time, of American food parcels, or people travelling to the States during the war, and being staggered at the food.

But since we do have followers for this blog in the States, I wonder if any of them can shed some light on this? Or has the author of the teen novel (maybe it's as well that I can't remember the title) just got it wrong about the rationing? I would love to know.

Second-generation trauma, by Leslie Wilson

mural at Savignyplatz S-bahn station, Berlin.
Photo: David Wilson

When I was a child, in the Fifties and early Sixties, industry still used sirens - maybe they were even old air-raid sirens, because it would have been a shame to waste them. They sounded like air-raid sirens to me, and every time the siren went at the quarry on the other side of Kendal, I would be completely terrified. My heart would race and I'd listen anxiously to hear if there were any planes coming.



My mother, my brother, and me, 50s

Years later, when I was researching Nazi Germany, I discovered that the people who lived through the war and endured air-raids, blocking out their terror, often began to relive it years later, going through post-traumatic stress disorder. I mentioned this to my mother who said, quite casually. 'Oh, yes. I went through that when I was expecting you.'

Recently, research has been done into the offspring of mothers who have lived in war zones when they were pregnant, or went through trauma, such as 9/11, and it has been found that the children have raised cortisol levels. I think I've got the terminology right. They go through life with that extra level of stress, and this isn't completely pointless and stupid, because if you're an animal living under stressful circumstances, it’s not a bad idea to have offspring whose reactions are a bit quicker and can get themselves out of nasty situations.

In any case, I can imagine that if, every time my mother heard a siren, or fireworks, or thunder, her heart rate sped up, thus constricting the oxygen flow to me, I would learn to be afraid of the same sounds - and I do still find fireworks an unpleasant noise, though I've learned to tolerate them, and also not to be afraid of thunder.

I used to hear my grandmother talking about her family, who were expelled from their homes in Silesia 'in the snow, just with the things they stood up in,' or talking - endlessly, my brother, who was older at the time, tells me - about the Nazis and concentration camps, and about what my grandfather went through when he was persecuted for being a leftist in 1933, and about her own fear of being 'picked out' for looking Jewish (she had auburn hair). What I took in was fear, dread, shuddering, associated with certain names. 'Hitler' was the chief of these, because my grandmother - not unreasonably - believed he was Antichrist, something that wasn't a healthy thing to believe during the Third Reich, especially not if you screamed it aloud, as she did, when you were taken into psychiatric hospital because you had a nervous breakdown. I knew Hitler was dreadfully evil before I ever knew the details of what he had done.

When I was somewhere between eight and ten - it's hard to remember the exact age things happened in childhood - my mother started to talk about the time the Russians captured her. She was a teenager in Austria, and they wanted to rape her. She managed to get away and escape the soldiers' pursuit, but was too terrified to go back to Graz, so she escaped into the mountains - this was in April - where she had virtually nothing to eat - she was eating tree-bark - and finally came down into Carinthia, where she collapsed on the first road she came to, was picked up by a British Army patrol, and taken to hospital in Velden. If she hadn't got so far, she would very likely have died up there, and maybe nobody would ever have known what had become of her.

She talked to me about these things, because she had nobody else to talk to, and I tried as best I could to comfort her. She told me about children as young as twelve being raped to death by Russian soldiers (I used to lie awake, brooding on those raped children) and how, when the Russian officer shut her into the room where he intended to have first go, she could hear a woman screaming upstairs, and knew what was happening to her.

But my mother would always end by assuring me that my brother and I were secure - that was the word she used. In my childhood, there was the Atom Bomb and the Cuban missile crisis, but I didn't live in a war zone. Very true. Later, too, when I began to want to write about Nazi Germany, she was angry with me, saying none of this was anything to do with me. Other people have asked me why I write about these things, and the same implication is there, that it was not my issue, because I was born in England with an English father, and didn't experience it.

Of course, fiction would be pretty impoverished if we all only wrote about what we've experienced, as my co-authors in this blog and their many readers know well. But actually, I did feel as if I had experienced these things, and the research and reading I have done, as well as the fiction grounded in that research, are the result of a deep compulsion to give a shape to inchoate horrors in my own psyche, to find out what these internalised terrors represented. What was behind my grandfather's temper, for example, his shoutings and rigidities, and my grandmother's shudder when she said 'concentration camp.'

photo: David Wilson

Since then, I've talked to other people whose parents had experienced the traumas of World War 2, and it has been a tremendous relief to me, and, I think, to them, to realise that we were not alone. Second generation trauma is a very real thing. A rabbi said to me once, about the Holocaust: 'What one generation can't cope with, they hand down to the next generation to deal with as best they can.' And I read, somewhere, about children whose parents had been partisans during the war, in Yugoslavia. They had never been told about this, and the parents were staggered - and probably appalled - to find their children disappearing into the woods and playing games that recreated their own lives and experiences as partisans.

It's odd, really, that many people find it so hard to comprehend how profoundly the next generation can be affected by the things their parents went through. Perhaps it's just too unsettling a concept. As far as my mother was concerned, I think she wanted to achieve for us what she had never had for herself, a safe, whole world to grow up in, and with her own anguish and trauma so vividly alive - till the end of her life she had nightmares of hiding in the undergrowth while the Russians searched for her, poking among the bushes with a stick, which at one moment came within inches of her face - she couldn't cope with our pain and anxieties - and I can see how they must have felt insubstantial to her.

I'm writing about this, not in any spirit of complaint or because I feel unfortunate - I don't, and neither did my mother; she knew she'd been lucky compared to many - but because I do think it is important to understand the phenomenon. Not least because that passed-on trauma is surely an ingredient in the long-standing, protectively-nursed hatreds that send nationalities and ethnic groups to war with each other; the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.

It's like the gut bacteria that are passed on to the infant from the mother via the birth canal, which science is discovering are far more significant to us than has ever been guessed; we are habitats, actually, populated by ideas, impressions, emotions from the past. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good reason for writing historical fiction.