Women Against Nazism: Elisabeth Abegg and her family, by Leslie Wilson.

Monument to deported Jews, Grunewald station Berlin.

Nazi-ruled Berlin, 1942: Jews were being 'deported' daily and taken off to the East, whence they never returned. Some went, if not obediently, at least hoping for the best, though their experience of what Germany under Nazism had become must have filled them with fear. Others were suspicious; perhaps they believed rumours they'd heard? In any case, the director of the Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, Liselotte Pereles, was concerned about one of the kindergarten workers, Eva Fleischmann. She wanted Eva to go 'underground' and live in hiding. She needed help, and the person she went to was a mild-looking, white-haired Quaker lady in her sixties. Elisabeth Abegg. She wasn't disappointed. The story that follows is taken from Liselotte Pereles's own words.

Elisabeth not only found a place for Eva to hide, but she also told Liselotte that she could come to her for help, if she needed it. Liselotte lived with a nine year-old niece, Susi Manasse, who was her ward; you might say she definitely needed help, but she was reluctant to take advantage of Elisabeth's 'simple and whole-hearted' offer of rescue. She didn't want to endanger her. However, one day, later in the year, Elisabeth called at Liselotte's house. Liselotte was at work, but little Susi was at home. Elisabeth said to Susi: 'It's time for you two to go underground. I'll be waiting for you.'

Liselotte still held out, but in the following February, when almost all her colleagues and all of the children had been taken away from the Jewish kindergarten, she heard about the great 'Action' which was meant to 'cleanse Berlin' of Jews, as a birthday present for Hitler. Worse, she was arrested and held in a Gestapo holding centre, but was able to get away. She rang Elisabeth from Charlottenburg station and let her know, using 'disguised words' that she'd gone underground. Presumably the words had been agreed in advance, because Elisabeth's reply was just as disguised. 'Say hello to my friend from the 'Ferdinand.'

That meant that Liselotte, with Susi, should go to the flat of a woman who was in hospital at the time, but had given permission for her home to be used. Liselotte hid there with another Jewish woman, Frau Collm, and a friend of Elisabeth's, Anita Schäfer, brought them food. Later, Elisabeth herself came 'always calm and kindly,' writes Liselotte, 'always only thinking of our welfare and our safety, fearless for herself.' They were moved round from hiding place to hiding place, sometimes staying in Elisabeth's own flat.

Snowdrops remind me of those brave, tough women

Elisabeth Abegg was an ex-teacher, but she had been dismissed from her post in 1940, denounced for political unreliability. She had grown up in Strassburg, and was first cousin to a well-known Social Democratic statesman; in her childhood, she was acquainted with Albert Schweitzer. At some stage in her life, almost certainly after World War 1, when Quaker feeding programmes in devastated Germany brought a small but significant number of Germans into the Quaker faith, she had joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). Thus she belonged to a religious grouping that had, and has, testimonies about equality simplicity of lifestyle, truthfulness, and peacemaking. It was a grouping that the Nazis suspected and loathed.

She lived, with her frail elderly mother and disabled sister Julie, in a block of flats where there were many active Nazis; some of them had denounced her for failing to put a flag out on special occasions, and she had even once been summoned for interrogation by the Gestapo. She was in many ways a marked woman, but that didn't frighten her into submission.

Memorial tablet to Elisabeth Abegg and her sister.

By OTFW, Berlin (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Elisabeth, (the real-life counterpart of the Quaker woman who helped Raf, Jenny and her mother in 'Saving Rafael,' and the anti-Nazis in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf ) had a wide network of helpers; Quakers, ex-pupils, a disabled pastor's wife, also her brother and sister-in-law. All of these were willing to hide Jews and other persecuted people, and in some cases to help them to leave Germany. Old Frau Abegg and Julie Abegg were enthusiastic and staunch helpers in the work. In addition, as the bombing got worse, two of Elisabeth's neighbours left Berlin for safer areas, and gave her the keys to their flats so she could keep an eye on them. She used the flats as hiding places.

Most of the time, the hidden Jews had to stay up in the flats during air-raids, which was a terrifying experience, but Julie Abegg sometimes took them into the shelter, where they sat face to face with Nazis. I suppose Julie said they were her visitors, which of course they were; but the Nazis had no idea what kind of visitors.

Every Friday the Abeggs entertained Jews to lunch at their home. Elisabeth cooked the meal. 'But', writes Liselotte, 'you gave us far more than bodily food. For two hours we could talk about the world of art and science, and we were able to forget that we couldn’t live like human beings any more.' Another hidden Jew, Herr Schäfer, said later: 'I couldn't have stood my time underground without the Friday lunches at the Abegg sisters' flat.' My mind boggles at the though of the Abegg sisters calmly, audaciously bringing these proscribed people into their flat for lunch. Maybe the active Nazis were all out? Elisabeth also kept a school at her flat for hidden Jewish children, and for half-Jewish children, who weren't allowed in the state schools.

Liselotte writes that there were particular difficulties about hiding children. They had to be taught to lie, and to tell consistent lies, however young they were. They had to learn false names and birth-dates, and to pretend to illnesses they hadn't had, to cover up the fact that they hadn't been at school at all (having been excluded by Nazi persecution).

The children had to keep changing their religion, to match the religion of whoever was hiding them, Lutherans, Catholics; and had to attend children's services. A five year-old called Evi had spent a year at a Jewish school, and so, put in a Lutheran kindergarten, she prayed in Hebrew when the children started to pray. She had to be moved at once.

The Quakers have a testimony, as I've said, about speaking the truth, but there are times when that testimony has to give way to wider truths; like the truth that every human being, of whatever ethnicity, deserves life. So Elisabeth cheerfully lied to the Gestapo, to her neighbours, to whoever needed to be kept in the dark. False identities, false documents, were to her only the instruments of Light against the darkness.

But what she offered, as Liselotte wrote, was not only safety and protection, or food, but kindness and reassurance, goodness of heart, and warmth. She must often have been intensely stressed, but she never let her protegés see it. Once her briefcase was stolen, on the Berlin S-Bahn. It was stuffed full of ration vouchers for the hidden people, and a transcript of a speech by Thomas Mann (émigré anti-Nazi and Nobel laureate) that she'd heard on the BBC, but worst of all, her ID card was in there. Luckily, when the police arrested the thief, he'd thrown a lot of stolen stuff in together, so it wasn't clear which belonged to whom. Then once a Jewish woman, Rita, was arrested at her hiding place in a pastor's house (The old pastor's wife was arrested, but her daughter offered herself as a hostage instead, and the Gestapo released the old lady). But Rita had left behind a notebook with the addresses of all Elisabeth's helpers. Elisabeth 'did everything to stave off the danger for the helpers, before the Gestapo found the book.'

I would love to know what that involved. Did Elisabeth just go to the house and get hold of the book, or did she go round to all her helpers and move the Jews out? Only where would she put them? Pereles's account doesn't specify and Abegg herself didn't apparently think her actions needed to be written about.

Clearly, Elisabeth wouldn't have been able to do what she did if she hadn't had that network of helpers. Not all the helpers stayed the course; sometimes they were bombed out of their homes, sometimes they couldn't stand the stress any longer. But they contributed, and did so with courage. Elisabeth gave them leadership, though, and probably courage and hope, even in the deepest political and social darkness.

As we face what for many of us looks like an oncoming dark tide of renewed hideous bigotry, both at home and abroad, I feel it is well worth it to reflect on Elisabeth Abegg. Could I do what she did? I don't know, and I do hope things don't get so bad in England. Where did her amazing strength come from? I'm sure her mother's and sister's support were crucial, as well as that of all those helpers, but also there was her Quaker faith, and the deep silence of Quaker worship. Perhaps she drew strength from these words of George Fox, one of the founders of Quakerism, words which are perhaps relevant to us today:

'The Lord is at work in this thick night of Darkness that may be felt; and Truth doth flourish as the rose, and the lilies do grow among the thorns, and the plants atop of the hills, and upon them the lambs doth skip and play. And never heed the temposts nor the storms, floods, nor rains, for the Seed Christ is over all and doth reign. And so, be of good faith and valiant for the Truth.'

If you want to look at a photograph of Elisabeth Abegg, you can find it by clicking this link to the photo archive at Yad Vashem,  .



This account of Elisabeth Abegg's life is drawn from: 'Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen', (Unsung Heroes; Human beings in Germany's Dark Days), edited by Kurt R Grossmann, first published by Ullstein Verlag in 1961.

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

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.

DOES BEING A HISTORICAL NOVELIST WARP YOU? by Leslie Wilson

I was thinking of this as we drove out of London just before New Year; when I saw a pub sign that was a metal bunch of grapes, thought: That looks old! looked again, saw it was modern, and lost interest. It is one of the downsides of being a historical novelist, I fear. Mentally cutting out all the buildings that weren't there during your period. Clearly, if you are writing about medieval times, you might find your London tends to be largely non-existent, but even if you are in Georgian times, as I am, it means that large swathes of towns have to be fuzzed out as you look at them. In Berlin-Charlottenburg, when I was writing Saving Rafael, I was always crossing out the modern bits annoyingly at the entrance floors of buildings. Here is Jenny's house from Saving Rafael, having had The Treatment. Later in the novel, a lot of damage had to be added from bombing.

I remember returning to Hong Kong in 2000, having spent eighteen months there in the early '80s, and then having written a novel set in the Hong Kong of the 1880s (The Mountain of Immoderate Desires). There are still some old buildings left in HK, but not many (one Hong Kong friend appalled me when he came to Henley and demanded: 'Why don't you knock all this old stuff down and build high-rises? You could just keep one or two old houses, to show people how it used to be). But I had, by then, spent so much time peering at numberless old photographs of the territory, that when I looked at the new city, I could see the old scenes like a veil over the new buildings.

Stage One of the process

Stage Two

Stage Three; more or less back in old Taipingshan

My father used to like to quote Marshall McLuhan's saying: 'We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror', saying that people (this included me, even in childhood obsessed with history) looking into the rearview mirror and seeing a coach and horses behind instead of a dull and boring car. I thought, in those days, that this would be an improvement. Adulthood, which is supposed to bring maturity, has at least brought me the insight that the coach and horses, to those living at the time, would be just as mundane as a Mondeo, whereas of course to those who experienced the first cars, and had to cope with their horses' fear of them, the car was anything but dull and boring.

Chinese junk, Hong Kong harbour 1982

Though on the Marshall McLuhan theme, skippers of vessels in Hong Kong harbour in the 1980s did still sometimes see junks (sometimes whole fleets of them) and sampans from their bridges. It all added to the vivid panorama of the port which one captain told the South China Morning Post, risked reducing him to a jibbering wreck. I know the above photo does look as if I'd photoshopped an old picture onto a new one, but believe me, I haven't a steady enough hand to do the scissoring out; those junks really were sepia-coloured.
I fear, however, that I am still looking in the rearview mirror; at present, for example, I have a tendency to mutter that we need Charles James Fox. I read the paper, more or less, every morning, only to let modern politics fall out of my mind and be more concerned with the state of Parliament in the late eighteenth century, and the state of play in the battle to win control from the meddling George the Third. His descendant, Charles Windsor, bids fair to rival him in going beyond his constitutional role, it has to be said - and there you are, I'm off… But tell me, have you heard whether the King is truly going mad again?
You have to button up your mouth for fear you become a bore - unless talking to other Historical Novelists, who understand.

Charles James Fox by Samuel Cotes (Parliament via Wikimedia Commons)

If you have adopted some of the language of your chosen period - something I normally find myself doing, except when I wrote about Nazi Germany, and had to translate all the dialogue out of German into English, you find yourself using its expressions, especially when writing. To be sure, I normally managed NOT to start talking German to incomprehending Brits, but it is much harder if your characters do speak the language you normally speak. Unless you are Hilary Mantel, whose characters all talk modern English. When she asked me for help with German for Wolf Hall, I was reaching out to my shelves for my 15th-century German books, and was a little disappointed to hear that she wanted modern German. It was easier, however! Hilary, however, does get kept awake, as she told the Guardian, by Tudor courtiers gossiping.
Finally: if the screening process I have mentioned above does fail in order to allow one to notice anything happening in the present day, specific to the present day (as opposed to eternal things like sex, grandchildren, human relations, gardening and making bread*), you are riddled with frustration because you CAN'T PUT THEM IN YOUR NOVEL!

So what does being a historical novelist/novel reader do to you???



*Though on that topic, you have the perennial problem and eternal/internal talking point: Is the Past Another Country? Did kneading dough feel different a hundred years ago? It has to be said that baking must have been a whole lot different without a thermostatted oven!

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.

ELSE URY, MY MOTHER'S FAVOURITE CHILDREN'S AUTHOR, by Leslie Wilson

Among the few things I have that stem from my mother's girlhood is a collection of five books for children and young girls dating from the twenties and thirties; in gothic script, with illustrations that I used to enjoy looking at before I actually read the books, because most of them were so glamorous (but more of that later). These are the 'Nesthäkchen' books, a concept rather difficult to translate. The 'Nesthäkchen' in a family is the littlest chick in the nest, the one who holds on when all the rest have left. 'Benjamina' is the closest equivalent, I suppose.









These books are set in the period just before World War 1, during the war, and in the Twenties. The last was published in 1925, the year my mother was born. The first one I read, when I was about ten, told the story of the heroine, Annemarie, when she gets scarlet fever and has to spend a year in a convalescent home to recover. My mother got that book in 1933. I wanted to know what happened next, so I read the one set in the First World War, somewhat upset by the anti-English feeling, but continued to the later stories. A couple of the intervening books were missing, and my grandfather sent me modern editions of them; published in the '60s, the illustrations showed the characters wearing '50s clothing.
The older books I have were almost all illustrated by Robert Sedlacek, a Viennese professor of applied art, and a successful advertising artist. He created graphics for Persil and for Eau de Cologne advertisements. Sometimes the advertising lineage shows; as in the scene where Annemarie's cousin proposes to her best friend while she's feeding the pigs on his farm . Though the text states that she always wore casual clothes on the farm, the clothes she and Peter wear in this picture are hilariously inappropriate (or maybe the picture is only meant to illustrate her state of mind?). There are a few more like this (girl wears high-heeled shoes to go climbing in the Bavarian Alps, for example).

On the other hand, the one of the girls in the rain was one of my childhood favourites, from 'Nesthäkchen in the World War.' But aren't the young girls (aged 13) killingly elegant?

Annemarie is a cheerful, sometimes scatter-brained, lively and loving girl from the educated and better-off layer of German society (her father is a doctor and the family have a cook and a maidservant, as well as a nanny for her), who has adventures, gets into trouble - but never terribly bad trouble - and speaks her mind. The stories are told in the voice of an appreciative, understanding aunt, and if they don't have the quality of 'Emil and the Detectives' they are deeply satisfying, page-turning story-telling. In addition, the one that tells about Annemarie's teen years contains stories of strikes, coal shortages, and many of the stresses of the Weimar Republic, so to a history-obsessed teenager it was deeply interesting, though it's not till recently, when I got hold of a pre-war copy via the Internet, that I noticed some of the things that had been edited out, like the mention of the concierge of Annemarie's apartment block being a Spartacist. I knew Annemarie's farmer cousins had been relocated, in newer editions, to Bavaria, because in the World War she went to stay with them in Upper Silesia. Why this was so, I don't know, given that the novel was set in the '20s.

Annemarie's life continues through a timescale that is curiously elastic; in the later books, when Annemarie is already a grandmother, (which by my reckoning) would have been the '60s, the dreadful inflation period is mentioned as in the early lifetime of her granddaughter. The World War (the First) is always just a few years back, and Hitler never comes. They always painted for me a picture of Germany as it might have been if it had not been for the catastrophe of Nazism, a normal country just like any other. No war, no bombing. The author is very German, but not (except in 'Nesthäkchen in the World War') in any way jingoistic, just proud of German culture and civilisation.

I have to say that I drew on Annemarie's family and her surroundings when I wrote 'Saving Rafael': curiously, when I recently re-read all the books, I realised that her family even lived in Knesebeckstrasse, which is where I have always thought Jenny and Rafael's family lived. I've stayed in hotels in these old apartment houses in Charlottenburg, and can imagine them in their old incarnation as dwellings. Hanna the cook in Annemarie's family isn't quite dissimilar from Kattrin the maid in Jenny's family - though Jenny's family weren't so prosperous, and I did take care to give Kattrin a different personality.


Anyway, shortly before she died, my mother told me that she thought Else Ury, the author, was Jewish. 'There was something..' she said and then stopped. And a few years after that, I was in a Berlin bookshop and saw a book that was called: 'Nesthäkchen goes to concentration camp.'







It was like reading 'Winnie the Pooh goes to concentration camp.' I felt as if I'd been thwacked in the face. I picked it up and discovered that yes, Else Ury was Jewish, and she was deported and immediately murdered in Auschwitz in January 1943. She was an old lady, and would have been regarded as useless. But I do wonder whether one of the women who forced her to undress and pushed her into the gas chamber had read and adored her books when she was a child. She must have lost her pride in German civilisation a good while before that.


For she was hugely successful in Germany. Her books sold in the hundreds of thousands; 'Nesthäkchen in the Convalescent Home', which my mother got in 1933, has on the title page '229-233 thousand.'

In fact, Ury's books (there were several other series as well as one-offs) have sold almost seven million copies over the years. My mother told me that she always got a Nesthäkchen book for Christmas; since she had five, that means that she got one every year at least till 1937, and if you feed in the three missing ones, that would take you up to the first year of the war. I certainly have the penultimate one in the collection. But Ury, as a Jew, was forbidden to write, and I do wonder if my grandparents bought the books in advance in 1936 when this edict went out and the Gestapo pruned 'bad books' out of the shops.


I wasn't, of course, the only person to be deeply shocked to discover that she was murdered. My response was typical, it seems. But the book (which I bought) wasn't actually a very good one, or based on any very close reading of Ury's work. Marianne Brentzel, who wrote it, claims that Annemarie becomes a contented housewife, something which no-one who reads the books can believe. A much better book 'Wiedersehen mit Nesthäkchen,' (Reunion with Nesthäkchen' was published by the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf museum in 2007, to accompany an exhibition. Scholarly, but approachable, it is deeply interesting, though unfortunately only available in German.


Its various authors make it clear, from an extensive reading of Ury's published work that she - who never herself married - was well aware of married women's aspirations to work and be independent of their husbands. Several of Annemarie's friends go into marriages where they work alongside their husbands - one is a pharmacist - and Annemarie herself may give up her medical studies to marry, but she works as her husband's assistant, helping him with x-rays and tests and many technical procedures that in those days doctors did in their own premises. All the same, in 'Nesthäkchen and her babies' she bursts out to her best friend: 'You can't believe how hard it is to have to come to one's husband for every bit of money you need to spend.. Women nowadays have a certain independence of spirit, and we want an economic self-sufficiency that our mothers and grandmothers never knew.' (my translation). However much Annemarie adores her children and loves being married, this frustration remains with her.

Ury was also well aware of the crass gulf between well-off and poor in Weimar Germany. However tough it is for Annemarie and her family, she knows about the misery of those who, though hard-working, were trapped in really desperate poverty. Annemarie's daughter and two of her granddaughters become social workers, and the younger of these even postpones her wedding till she's qualified, and will definitely work after her marriage. In fact, there's a book by Ury that I have only read about because they're so rare, in which a businessman's daughter upsets her family (destroying their Sunday afternoon peace) by protesting about the conditions her father's workers endure, and demanding that he does something about it.

My own mother, as a young bride in England after the war, determinedly got herself a job (much to my father's dismay at first) and worked for almost her whole life as a teacher, studying at night to get the degree and Masters that she wanted. Perhaps Ury's stories encouraged her. Re-reading the books, I feel that my mother learned from the humane attitudes towards children and young people that permeate Ury's work - and frequently put them into practice (no parent is perfect!). My mother certainly didn't learn them from my grandfather, who was a harsh-tongued, disciplinarian parent (and grandparent), whereas my grandmother was so psychologically fragile that my mother spent most of her childhood as a carer. She must have envied Annemarie her secure family, and determined that when she was a parent, she would be like the people in the books. So I think I have cause to be deeply grateful to Else Ury.


Nowadays, an alleyway just beside Savignyplatz station in Berlin (close to her childhood home) is named after her, and there is a growing interest in her work.

Plaque marking one of the houses Ury lived in, in Berlin.

Wikimedia Commons.

Else-Ury Bogen, Charlottenburg

Berlin. Photo; David Wilson

Nothing can change the bitter tragedy of her death; but future generations, as well as the thousands of German girls who adored her books during her lifetime, continued to love her work. Like so many other of Germany's Jews, she was a vital part of German culture, and not the worst efforts of the Nazis could root that out.

(Jacket images and illustrations come from my own collection of books.)

When My Mother met Hitler, by Leslie Wilson

I don't have a photo of my mother as a teenager, but here she is
aged 20.

Gerda, my mother, was the daughter of a police officer, born in Germany, but living in Graz, Austria, where my grandfather had been posted at the Anschluss. She had a mother who suffered from depression, (though at this time my grandmother had only had one nervous breakdown, after months of persecution when my grandfather was in danger of losing not only his job, but his life.)

My grandmother disliked and feared the Nazis, which my mother understood as 'some kind of phobia connected with Hitler', and knew she had to be careful about mentioning him to her mother, for fear she should become ill again.

My grandmother after her first nervous breakdown

My grandfather had been reinstated in his job, largely because my grandmother had put on her best clothes and gone to plead for him with a high official who had fixed things in Berlin, as the documents I have seen confirm. He was doing well in his career now, but he was reticent about Hitler. Sometimes Gerda tried to ask him questions about the Führer, but he was non-commital and changed the subject.

It wasn't safe to tell your children how you felt. They might, quite innocently, say something at school, and the teachers might pass it on. My grandfather had decided to go along with a system he detested and he had to be very careful. 'I could have resisted,' he told my mother years later, 'but I thought about you and your mother.' If he had been taken to concentration camp and murdered there, there would have been no state money for them. They would have been left to the charity of relatives.

It was just before the outbreak of war, when Gerda was thirteen or fourteen, that Hitler visited Graz. She wrote: 'Everywhere I see pictures of Hitler surrounded by cheering crowds, ecstatic adoring youngsters, and I am beginning to envy those to whom he speaks.' Meanwhile, flags and banners adorned with swastikas and 'EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER,' began to appear everywhere. It was only a year since Austria had been 'taken home into the Reich', to widespread jubilation, and now the Führer was coming in person. 'Excitement,' my mother wrote, 'grows to fever pitch.'

Graz in the Forties

And then she discovered the ecstatic truth. She had been chosen to be among those who met Hitler! She lay awake in her excitement, and was worried to see the next morning, that her mother looked pale and ill. Maybe it was the fact that the man she really regarded as Antichrist was coming to the city that filled my grandmother with horror. But she only went to lie down, so my mother was free to escape from the apartment, feeling slightly guilty, and run to the place where the schoolgirls were waiting for the Führer. 'Then,' she wrote, 'the intolerable waiting starts.'

Why did they choose my mother, the daughter of a man with a shadow in his past and a mother who had a psychological illness - which was bad news in the Nazi period? She wasn't even a member of the German Girls' League. She had joined at first, but had quickly left because she found it boring and annoying: 'Too much standing around for hours so you could form a swastika when some important person flew over,' she told me. She also said her teacher told her the family would lose their ration book if she left the League, but she did anyway, and the family did kept the ration book.
Gerda was probably chosen because she was a pretty girl with blonde hair. She looked like the Aryan ideal.

My mother's ID card from 1943. A typical
bad id document photo!

My mother described the roar of cheering as Hitler's motorcade approached them: 'Throats are choked with excitement, eyes blinded by tears of emotion; in a delirium of joy and happiness hands are raised to jubilant heights in the Hitler salute. At this instant everyone present feels that this is the moment in history to be talked about to children and grandchildren for years to come.

'Then, as in the close-up of a film, everything fades and there is only a fair-skinned face, a wing of fine dark hair falling across a broad forehead, the compelling gaze of hypnotic blue eyes, the firm grip of his hand, a flash of gold as he laughs at something I have said in reply to his question, something to do with school, I think. I am aware of my madly-pumping heart and the blood roaring in my ears when he smiles kindly, pats my cheek and moves on to the next child in line.'

Photograph: German Federal archive via Wikimedia Commons,
clipped by me. 

Afterwards, she wrote: 'the memory of the brief moment when I was actually speaking to the Führer, an event so momentous that it almost seems like a dream, makes all else pale into insignificance.'

Re-reading her account of the meeting takes me right to the heart of the German and Austrian experience of the mass Nazi event, something so powerful and adrenaline-fuelled that it would sweep you away even if you weren't one of the favoured ones. I remember seeing a TV programme about Jews who survived Nazism by hiding; one of them, in Berlin, would go to Nazi events because you were safer in a crowd, and he said he'd so often wished they had let him be part of it, it had felt so marvellous.

And Hitler had charm - though the gold tooth is less appealing. In those days it wasn't as off-putting as it would be now. Hitler was good with children. You can see that charm in some old videos - I have never liked to see it, I don't want to be beguiled by him even for a second, and yet if one doesn't see it, how can one understand his success?

I had to let myself feel it when I wrote, in Saving Rafael, about Jenny going to see Hitler with her school, and even though she and her family hated him and she was far more aware than my mother, she too was caught up in the mass experience, a communal high that was temporarily irresistible.

My mother did tell me about it, and about Hitler's intensely blue eyes, when I was a child - but it was a different kind of telling than she or anyone else had dreamed of on that day. Now Hitler had been exposed as exactly what my grandmother always knew he was, the quintessence of evil, though she had been accused of phobia and mania for doing so.


Shadow of War, by Gerda Erika Baker, Lion publishing, 1990

Maria von Maltzan - a German resistance heroine, by Leslie Wilson



Maria and Hans



In 1943, Maria von Maltzan, a German aristocrat, took Hans Hirschel, her Jewish lover into her Berlin apartment to hide him from the Nazis. It was the time when the last Jews were supposed to be 'cleansed' out of Berlin. Since Hans had ingeniously faked his own suicide, he was registered as dead, and for a long while, no suspicion fell on Maria; but one day a neighbour handed her a yellow card, which she said a gentleman who'd come calling for her had dropped. It said: Jews are living at Maltzan's.

Hans had brought a sofa with a hollow base with him, when he came to her,  and when she was out during the daytime (she was a veterinary surgeon) Hans hid in there, with a bottle of liquid codeine to keep his troublesome chronic cough at bay. Maria had thoughtfully drilled breathiGng holes in the base.

(That makes me think of hamsters or mice in a box, which I realise now is why Raf, in Saving Rafael, accuses Jenny and her mother of keeping him like a little animal in a cage. I didn't think about that when I was writing it, though.)

Now she went back to her apartment, and told Hans to get into the sofa base, because the Gestapo were coming. Two men duly arrived at half past two and ransacked the apartment for three and a half hours. While they did this, she threw a ball for her two dogs, and when the Gestapo asked her if she could stop because it was getting on their nerves, she said, calmly, that her dogs were missing their walk because of the search and had to have some exercise.

She could get away with this because she was an aristocrat, and her father had been a high-ranking Army officer, and his portrait was watching them intimidatingly from the wall.

Then they demanded that she open the sofa-bed, which was made of heavy mahogany. She said it was stuck; she had bought it four weeks ago and had tried to open it several time.  'If you don't believe me,' she added, while the Gestapo men heaved and grunted in their heavy uniforms, 'you can get your pop-guns out and shoot holes in it - but if you do that, I insist that you give me a coupon for new upholstery material and that you pay for the repairs. And I want that in writing now.'

The Gestapo men decided this was too much for them to handle, and they left. When Maria let Hans out, he was white as chalk and drenched with sweat.




Maria in her youth

 The Gestapo didn't give up, though; they hung around in the courtyard at night, listening for sounds from the apartment. So Maria took Hans to a new, temporary, hiding place and warned the other Jews who came to her home to stay away. Then, one cold night, she poured water on the narrow tiled alleys that led to the courtyard, and then stretched thin wires across the alleys too. Of course, the Gestapo tripped over the wires and then went skidding across the ice. Maria called the police and told them she had burglars; she also called the butcher from over the way, who arrived brandishing his axe. She wrote, in her memoir: 'So now I had everything I wanted. The Gestapo in the courtyard were faced by me, the police, and the axe-wielding butcher. I pretended to be hysterical with fear.' The Gestapo stopped visiting the courtyard at night.

Maria was a Silesian countess, so a countrywoman of my mother's. When the First World War broke out, she and her many brothers and sisters, infected by jingoistic frenzy, tried to burn their French governess - luckily they were found out and the governess rescued. As a child, she also threatened to throw the ex-King of Saxony into a lake, when she'd taken him to see some nesting birds and he wanted to disturb them: 'Unfortunately, I shall have to drown Your Majesty.'

When she was a veterinary student in Breslau (now Wrocław), she was short of money (of course) and the family jeweller paid her to wear his stock of pearls. He said she had just the right kind of skin to help them keep their lustre. She wore these valuable strings under her blouse every day, and nobody ever noticed. 'Nice easy money,' she said.

Later, she became a fervent anti-Nazi and helper of Jews. She was involved with the Swedish Church in Berlin (the organisation who I used to fictionally help Raf and Jenny out of Germany). I don't have room here to go into all her exploits, but she also helped animals escape conscription by giving them drugs that made them temporarily ill. Her view was that the dogs and horses hadn't consented to fight for Hitler, so why should she help force them to?



Maria in later life

 Her autobiography, Schlage die Trommel und Fürchte Dich Nicht (Beat the Drum and Fear Not - which is unfortunately not available in English - is an amazing read, and as it unfolded, I did begin to wonder what this woman was on? She seemed utterly tireless as well as staggeringly courageous. But then she did let out that she had become addicted to amphetamines, which, as a vet, she found it quite easy to get hold of. After the end of the war, Maria was prosecuted, had her licence to practise withdrawn, and taken into a brutal withdrawal centre, run by people who appeared to have got their training in concentration camps. The court didn't appear to care about her heroism, or even consider the stresses she had been under. Sadly, though she married Hans, the marriage didn't last. They remained good friends, though.

She finished her life in the Berlin area of Kreuzberg - where her pet monkey enlivened the place by periodically getting out of the flat and calling on the neighbours. The animal was very well-behaved, they told her. She liked being surrounded by punks and 'alternative' young people, and when she walked her dogs in the evenings, she relished the sight of the Turks who made the area colourful and lively - and the fact that they got on well with their German neighbours. Her parting comment on her life was: 'I wasn't bored for a moment.'



A plaque on the house Maria lived in during the Nazi period, commemorating her resistance work



 I have discovered that there is a chapter about her in a book called: Women Heroes of World War II:  by Kathryn Attwood, published last year. Part of her story is also told in Leonard Gross's book: The Last Jews in Berlin. The quotes from her memoir were translated by me.  The title Schlage die Trommel und Fürchte Dich Nicht is taken from the opening line of a poem by the German Jewish Heinrich Heine.