My war years: A British Jew remembers living during World War II - opinion

Sunday, September 3, 1939, dawned clear and sunny in the southwest of England, but to me the weather meant nothing. Aged just eight, and hundreds of miles from home, I felt lost.

I was surrounded by cousins, uncles, and aunts, but I wanted my mum and dad and the familiar surroundings of home.

At dawn two days before, Germany had launched an unprovoked assault on Poland. An advance force consisting of more than 2,000 tanks crossed the border, supported by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. To people in Britain, the news meant that war was inevitable.

The government instantly put into effect the plans it had devised months before to protect city children from the anticipated aerial bombing. It began transferring youngsters in their thousands from cities and towns to rural areas. This evacuation, known as Operation Pied Piper, was the largest movement of people in British history, with over 1.5 million people evacuated, including 800,000 children.

The next day, Saturday, the papers were filled with pictures of bewildered boys and girls on crowded railway platforms, all carrying their gas masks and bearing their names firmly affixed to their coats with string. Mothers in tears waved to their little ones as they steamed out of railway stations bound for unknown destinations.

My wealthy uncle, who had built up a flourishing manufacturing business from scratch, had taken matters into his own hands. He had traveled down to Somerset, in the far southwest of the country, and rented a large derelict house. He then invited his married brothers and sisters, if they wished, to come and join him and his family, or to send their children, until the “emergency,” as it was called, resolved itself.

My parents earned their living from a grocery store in London, situated within a largely Jewish population. They did not feel it would be right to close down and flee. So, in accordance with the posters that had begun to appear, they “stayed calm and carried on.” But they sent their only child to safety in the country with his close family.

For most of the 1930s, Britain had clung to the trope that the First World War had been “the war to end wars.” The country persisted in yearning for peace, despite the mounting evidence that peace was not to be had at any price.

Once Adolf Hitler had the reins of power in his hands, he began an ever-accelerating program of rearmament. Much of Britain’s political elite approved, believing that Germany had been treated unfairly under the terms exacted after the First World War in the Treaty of Versailles. For years, the UK government dragged its feet over calls to maintain an arms superiority over Germany.

Only one voice in parliament rang out strong and clear against Hitler and the Nazi regime – that of Winston Churchill, who was labeled a “warmonger” on all sides.

Increasingly, Hitler’s truly aggressive and expansionist ambitions became clear. Just ahead of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, German troops, in defiance of Versailles, marched into the Rhineland and annexed it to the Reich. Hitler proceeded to swallow Austria in March 1938 and immediately begin to demand that the Sudetenland – the German-populated borderlands of Czechoslovakia – be “reunited” with the Fatherland.

In September 1938 the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, made a final bid to placate the implacable. He flew to Hitler’s residence at Berchtesgaden, and in discussions involving the French prime minister, Italian leader Benito Mussolini, and his foreign minister, concluded what is known as the Munich Agreement. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany agreed, without consulting Czechoslovakia, that “the occupation by stages of the predominantly German territory by German troops will begin on 1st October.” The document was signed on September 29.

The next day Chamberlain flew back to England, and at the airport waved a flimsy piece of paper in the air. It was not the Munich Agreement but a separate nonaggression pact that he had induced Hitler to sign before leaving Berchtesgaden.

“This morning,” he announced to the crowd, “I had another talk with the German chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it, as well as mine.... I would just like to read it to you: ‘We regard the agreement signed last night... as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’”

Later that day, he stood outside the prime minister’s residence, 10 Downing Street, and told the cheering crowd: “My good friends...  a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

A few days later, the German army marched into the Sudetenland and annexed it. In March 1939, the Czech prime minister was forced to sign away the rest of the country. The Reich took over, and it was ruled by Hitler’s Reichsprotektor.

That was when the British public began preparing in earnest for the possibility of war.

Hitler’s next demand was for the cession to Germany of Poland’s city port of Danzig. The Treaty of Versailles had declared Danzig to be a free city administered by Poland and the League of Nations. This time, Britain and France were determined to thwart Hitler’s insatiable demands. On March 31, 1939, they formed a military alliance with Poland that guaranteed its sovereignty and independence, and they promised to defend it if attacked.

The attack came on September 1, 1939. Chamberlain sent Hitler a note declaring that if he did not withdraw his forces from Poland, Britain would declare war.

Eight years old I may have been, but I clearly recall standing in the warm sunshine that Sunday morning surrounded by family, listening to the radio placed near an open window. As Chamberlain uttered the words “this country is at war with Germany,” everyone reacted, and one of the women burst into tears.

My war years had begun.

Living during World War II

IN THE 1930s, England was blessed with two major Jewish boarding schools.

My parents chose the one situated in the south coast seaside resort of Hove. No one had the slightest premonition that within less than a year, Hitler’s forces would have conquered three-quarters of Europe, including France, and that Britain faced the very real risk of invasion across the English Channel – which I and my schoolmates could see from our dormitory window.

My headmaster was not one to let the grass grow under his feet. Selecting the remotest part of west Wales for safety, he found a castle standing in its own extensive grounds that was large enough to accommodate his school. One morning in the fall of 1940, the whole school contingent crowded into a number of coaches, and we set off on a five- or six-hour journey.

And there I spent the next four years, seeing my parents only briefly. There is usually a silver lining to the darkest cloud, and with little to distract me I received a solid education, both general and Jewish, and was thoroughly prepared for my bar mitzvah.

For this I returned home. It was June 1944. My first morning back coincided with the arrival over London of what German propaganda had dubbed “Hitler’s secret weapon” – the V-1 cruise missile, or “doodlebug,” as it was quickly named. Unmanned, it chugged its way toward its target. Then its engine cut out, it turned its nose toward the ground, and fell, exploding as it landed.

It was succeeded a few weeks later by the V-2, a much more lethal version, which flew swiftly and silently, and hit its target with no warning. As Allied armies moved further into Germany, they overran the V-2 launch sites, and the rockets stopped arriving. Finally, on May 8, 1945, Churchill, who had been prime minister since 1940, broadcast to the nation announcing Victory in Europe Day.

The country went wild. London was filled with rejoicing crowds. It was a heady time to be young and alive.

The full horror of what the Nazi regime had inflicted on the Jewish people was soon to be revealed, but indications of the Holocaust even then being perpetrated had reached the Allies as early as 1942. It even reached us in our secluded castle in Wales.

Sometime in 1942, a new boy aged about 14 arrived in the school. He spoke good English but with a German accent. We asked him how he had come to join us.

His family had been picked up in a typical aktion, and he and his father had been separated from his mother and the others. They had been packed into an overcrowded railway wagon and started on a journey which lasted so long that he and his father were reduced to urinating in his father’s hat.

When the train halted briefly and people were allowed out of the wagons for a break, he and his father managed to slip away.

If I heard how they succeeded in making it over the Swiss border, I have forgotten the details. But here he was, in our midst, safe and sound, embodying a minor triumph against the evil that had plunged the world into the Second World War.