Flash fiction: Leaving Home

I haven't posted fiction on this blog; I haven’t written many short pieces that would be suitable. But I have just completed a short story for a writing group. The set title was Leaving Home. 

My contribution was prompted by a recent house move. My new home was built in 1888, and I have been thinking of those who were here before and what became of them. Hence this story. I noticed today’s date, and thought I’d share it.

Leaving home

I wish he wouldn’t make that bloody row, thought Priscilla as Martin dropped one tool on another in the bedroom across the hall. She winced at the clang and tried to refocus on her screen. The rain streaked the window behind her monitor; grey clouds scudded past outside.

Martin let out an exclamation.

Dammit, how am I supposed to mark a bunch of crappy first-year essays with this old clown working next door.

She stood up and crossed the corridor. The fitted carpet in the bedroom was peeled back so Martin could get at the broken floorboard; it was just beside her bed so she always stepped on it in the night. He had pulled up the broken board, but was now squatting on his haunches, the claw hammer on the carpet beside him.

“I wish you’d make less noise,” she said. She regretted it at once; her voice sounded tense, uptight.

Martin seemed not to hear. He held a small square piece of paper.

“I found something,” he said. “Old photo. Under the floorboard.”

He passed it to her. It was rather small.

“Why print a picture that size?” she said, puzzled.

 “It’s a contact print from an old-fashioned negative,” he said. “Six centimetres square, I think. I have a friend who likes mucking about with old cameras and he makes those.”

She turned it over in her hands. It was brownish and faded and showed a youth in his late teens and a girl who looked a little younger. The girl wore a dress with a rather prim collar. Her hair had been done with care and was formed in a high roll above her forehead. The youth wore uniform; he had a narrow cap without a peak that came to a point at the front, rather like a ship’s stem.

“Why are they sticking their tongues out at the camera?” asked Priscilla. She frowned.

Martin chuckled. “I reckon their mum and dad made them go and have their portrait done,” he said. “And they didn’t fancy that much and they took the piss out of the photographer.” He looked over her shoulder at the little square of photographic paper. “Look, it’s got PROOF embossed on it. I reckon that’s how they did it then – the studio gave you a load of contact prints and you chose which one to have enlarged.” He turned it over. “Look, there you go. It’s the studio’s stamp. Pringle’s, 31 The Broad. I remember them, just. Where MacDonald’s is now. They closed when I was a nipper, back in the 70s.”

“What on earth has she done to her hair?” asked Priscilla.

“Victory Rolls, they called them,” said Martin. “The Hollywood stars had them apparently.” He peered at the picture. “Royal Air Force,” he said presently. “Not an officer I don’t think. Look, he’s got a half-wing.” He pointed to the man’s breast. “Air gunner or navigator maybe.”

 “Oh.” She handed the picture back to him. “I wonder who they were. Anyway, you can pop it in the rubbish I suppose.”

He frowned. “I think I’ll keep it,” he said. “Someone might know something. My mate Josh, he likes local history, he’s one of those blokes digging up the old City Station up near Halfords. He knows how to look at the old census returns and he can see who lived here.”

“Please yourself,” said Priscilla. “I have 20 essays to mark before lunch.”

She went out. Martin looked at the picture then up at her retreating back. And stuck his tongue out. Then he chuckled, tucked the picture away in his jacket and went back to work.

Priscilla went back to her study. She did not hear the front door close or feel the faint breeze as a middle-aged woman in an apron and sensible shoes descended the stairs behind her.

In the front room a man with a pipe and cardigan looked up from the Daily Sketch as his son and daughter came in.

“Did they get the proofs?” called his wife as she turned into the kitchen at the back of the house. “Ted, Sarah, is that you?” She went on into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put it on the range. “I’ll make a cup of tea.”

“Don’t make tea if we haven’t the coal,” her son called out. “You’re spoiling me, Mum, but you’ll need it when I’m gone.”

“Don’t worry, Ted. We’ve got a hundredweight in hand, and we’re allowed more on the first of the month.” She came into the front room, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s see these pictures then. Oh, they’re lovely, aren’t they?”

“They’re not bad, eh?” Her husband smiled up at her. “And old Pringle on his own now, with his son in for the duration, as they say.”

“He’s back on leave,” said Ted. “Mr Pringle told me. He’s been in Egypt, he said.”

“We’re not supposed to say where people are,” his father said.

“I don’t think as we’re going to lose because someone knows where young Pringle is, Bill.” She took the proofs from him and leafed through this one, then stopped. “Oy! What’s happening here!”

“It was Ted,” said the girl. “He sticks his tongue out and before I know it I’m sticking mine out as well. Let’s get Pringle’s to blow that one up.” She giggled.

 “Oh no we won’t. You can have that one, you cheeky monkey,” her mother said, and handed her the proof. “Dad and I’ll choose one for the mantelpiece. Ted, you must get ready, you’re off in half an hour.”

“I’ll help him pack his kitbag,” said Sarah. “He’ll scrunch up his shirts otherwise. Boys are so messy.”

They rushed up the narrow stairway of the small house and their footsteps could be heard from the master bedroom, where Sarah had laid out her brother’s clothes ready for folding.

“I reckon this is the one we’ll get blown up,” said Bill, and looked up at his wife, who looked at him then tried to dry her eyes on her apron but couldn’t because it was tied at the waist so she untied it, sniffing and laughing at the same time. “Oh, I am silly,” she said.

“Try and hide it, my dear. It won’t make it easier for him, you know. And he’s left home before. Remember he went off to basic training, then the Isle of Man, and now he’s just going off for more training.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just that I have a bad feeling about this,” she said. “As if he’s leaving home for the last time.”

“Well he probably isn’t,” said her husband, a little shortly. He was silent for a moment, then said: “Don’t fret. Sit down and let’s listen to the news, eh?”

He got up and twisted the Bakelite knob on the wireless. The dial took on a soft, old-gold glow and the sound started, softly at first then growing louder as the set warmed up. The Home Service filled the room, an emollient voice reading the six o’clock news.

Upstairs, Ted sat on his parents’ bed and watched as his sister folded his shirts.

“I want to do something too,” she said. “I’m going to join the Women’s Land Army.”

“Not yet you’re not,” he said. “You’re only 17.”

“I’ll be 18 at Christmas,” she said.

“But you have to be 20, don’t you? Anyway, you’d be dead useless shovelling manure. Or catching rats. Imagine you catching rats. They’d take one look at you and you’d scream your silly head off.”

She gave his leg a pretend slap with the back of her hand. She went back to folding and smoothing the shirts. He watched her deft movements as she said: “Dad says you’re going for more training.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, sort of. I’m posted to No. 12 OTU at Chipping Warden in the Midlands. It’s near Banbury I think. An OTU is an Operational Training Unit.”

“Does Operational mean what I think it does?”

“Yes. But it shan’t be much. Just minelaying off the coast and stuff I expect. You mustn’t worry.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment. “Do you remember when I was 10 and Roy from No. 6 pulled my pigtails?”

“No, I don’t,” he replied. “Did he really? What a rotter.”

“Yes, and you boxed his ears.”

“Oh, I think I do remember. Did I box his ears? I thought I gave him a Chinese burn.”

She sat still, looking down at the shirt. A silence grew heavy.

“Look, we all have to do it,” he said. “Everyone’s leaving home. Dad did last time. Roy’s gone, come to that.” He paused. “Have you got that proof Mum gave you? Give it here.”

She did, and he knelt down where there was a creaky floorboard, just beside the bed so their mother always stepped on it in the night. He pushed the small square of paper down between the cracks.

“There,” he said. “When it’s all over and I’m home, we’ll pull that floorboard up and get that picture, and we’ll have a giggle about it and I do think I’ll go down to Pringle and get it blown up.”

“And if you don’t come back, I’ll leave it there,” she said. “And maybe in 70 or 80 years’ time, someone’ll find it and wonder who we were.”

“That’s it. But I’ll be back.”

“Hope so.” She looked at him.

“Ted,” his father called up the stairs. “It’s 6.30. You ready? Where you going from anyway, City Station or Thorpe?”

“Thorpe,” he said. “They bombed City Station.”

His sister finished folding shirts and he clattered down the stairs with it and took his greatcoat and gas-mask case from the coathooks.

“I can go with you,” said Sarah.

“Don’t,” he said. “Station’ll be bedlam. So many trains going now. ’Spect I’ll get a cuppa on the platform though, the WVS ladies have a canteen there when it’s busy.”

“I’ll come some of the way with you though.”

“Just to the corner, all right? We can say goodbye there.”

Her father was looking at her as she put her coat on. He leaned towards her. “Leave him at the end of the road, my dear. Let him be. They need to be alone with their own thoughts a bit when they go,” he whispered.

She nodded and waited while her brother gave his mother a peck on the cheek and shook hands with his father; then they went out into the street. It was nearly dark. The blackout was complete, but the moon was nearly full and a bright light caught the beginnings of a frost on the pavement. She walked with him to the end of the street, where it joined The Avenues. To the left the road ran downhill, in a straight line; then it climbed to a junction about a quarter of a mile away. There the road joined another and swung round to the right. They didn’t say anything, but he paused a moment and grasped her shoulder and squeezed it with his hand, and seemed to want to say something but didn’t; then he turned abruptly and trudged away. She watched him for several minutes, the moon making a stark figure of him, standing out against the glitter of the frosted pavement. Then he rounded the bend at the top of the hill. He paused for a moment and she thought he looked back, the moonlight catching his face; but he was too far away to see really, and then he was gone.

___________________________________________

More flash fiction

Cold
Everything is cold here

Homecoming
A sort of love story

Solitude
A Cold War story

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of human geography

Hiraeth
A yearning…

Strange Places
A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different

Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging
Do you? Where?

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

On the Rim of the Sea

 Enjoy the sea view. Don’t fall in

At the end of 2012 I started this blog. I don’t know quite what I planned to do with it at the time. The heading says “Travel, science, books Whatever I feel like, really.” Which is more or less how it’s panned out. It’s been an eclectic mess of pieces covering everything from lentil recipes to politics. (Quite a lot of politics, actually.)

I realized that some of the pieces were beginning to fit a pattern. I would become interested in some topic or event, and gather books about it – then use them to write a piece on that particular subject, examining the different angles and accounts. I don’t think this format was a new idea. Punch did this in its book-review pages when I was growing up and I believeThe New Yorker has also done so. It lets you swoop down upon some incident or time that has piqued your curiosity. 

In my case, they included such varied topics as the philosophy of science, the world’s worst shipwreck (no, not the Titanic), the postwar occupation of Germany, the extraordinary life of Marie Curie’s daughter Ève, the fate of Chinese labourers on the Western Front, the way novelists have seen Fleet Street, a writer’s memoirs of Imperial India, the last great sailing ships, and the Golden Age of crime fiction.

At some point I saw that, strung together in the right order, the pieces would be a review of the 20th century through its memoirs and literature. At that point my new book, On the Rim of the Sea, began to take shape.

The book’s title was inspired by a passage in the splendid Instead of a Letter, by the late Diana Athill. In it she describes how, as a child, she shocked her grandmother by talking of life as being in a bowl, floating on the sea; provided one stayed at the bottom of the bowl, one might be serene – but every now and then the motion of the sea flung one up the side and forced one to a view of “dangerous, cold grey water” that would be unbearable. That, she said, was the origin of madness. Is it? The years covered by the pieces in this book (roughly, 1912 to the present) certainly showed us more of the sea than we should have liked. As I write (May 2022), the cold grey water is back with a vengeance. But it has not always been that way. This book has its darker bits, but there were lighter times.

This book is, in part, a self-indulgence – I acknowledge that freely; it’s the result of years spent reading books on a whim. But there is also a purpose. The books of a time, especially its memoirs and reportage, do hold up a mirror to a period or incident when it has long passed. I’d strongly disagree with the critic Cyril Connolly, who wrote in The Unquiet Grave (1944) that: '"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence." This is, frankly, bullshit. Most writers will not produce a masterpiece – I won’t – and we don’t always aspire to. Rather, we provide a lens through which others can better see the world. This is not always an art; quite often, it is just a craft.

If On the Rim of the Sea shines a light on unfamiliar corners of the past century, I shall be happy. If its readers enjoy it, I shall be very happy indeed.

Where to buy On the Rim of the Sea

The book is available as both an ebook and a paperback. If you’d like to support independent bookshops (as many people do), they can order it; you will need the ISBN number (978-0991437481).

To buy online:

Amazon (or in the UK, here)

Apple Books

Barnes & Noble/Nook

BetterWorldBooks

Booktopia (Australia)

Waterstones

Rakuten Kobo

Scribd

 

If not us, who? If not now, when?

German resistance to the Nazis was not that effective. But it was perhaps more widespread than we think. A recent book gives a vivid insight into subversion at the heart of the Third Reich

The history of German resistance against the Nazis is a subject maybe not well understood in Britain or the US. We are familiar with the French resistance and Italian partisans, but of the German resistance, most of us would know only of the July plotters and Claus von Stauffenberg, who got within an ace of killing Hitler in 1944.

In fact, there were numerous plots to kill Hitler, and at least two others got quite close. One, in 1939, was by carpenter Georg Elser, whose bomb in a Munich beer hall exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left it early. Then in 1943 a Wehrmacht officer, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, planted a bomb on Hitler’s plane in Smolensk. Disguised a package of cognac bottles, the bomb iced up and didn’t detonate, forcing von Schlabrendorff to rush to Germany and retrieve it. (Elser was executed; von Schlabrendorff nearly was too, but survived and had a distinguished postwar career as a judge.)

More generally, quite a few Germans did take part in the Widerstand, or resistance, either active or passive. How many, is very hard to know. But there are startling stories – not least the so-called Edelweiss Pirates, a loose grouping of teenagers who rejected the regimented nature of the Hitler Youth (and occasionally beat up its members). They seem also to have done heavier stuff such as helping deserters from the Wehrmacht. But they had no love of the Allies either; they seem just to have hated everyone. Other, more organized resistance groups spread propaganda. The best known outside Germany is the White Rose, a Munich student group that was active for only six or seven months before its leading members, Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, were caught and guillotined in 1943.

However, the circles around charismatic Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, his attractive wife Libertas and the economist Arvid Harnack probably did more, and for longer. Besides propaganda work, they also made a determined attempt to pass information to the Allies. When they were finally caught, the Nazis were badly rattled to find so much subversion at the heart of the German establishment, and they reacted with savagery. 

The Schulze-Boysens and their friends are remembered today as part of the Soviet spy ring – the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra. But the reality was messier. Now we have a vivid insight into the Schulze-Boysens and the Rote Kapelle, thanks to a German writer, Norman Ohler.

*

Ohler is a versatile writer. A German journalist who spent time on the West Bank as a writer-in-residence, he has also been a novelist and once collaborated on a screenplay with Wim Wenders. In more recent years Ohler, now 51, has put his hand to writing history. In 2015 he published an account of the role of drugs in Nazi Germany. The book, published in English the following year as Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, suggested that drugs such as coke, methamphetamine and crystal meth played a huge role in the war; workers and soldiers were encouraged to take them, and much of the German high command was basically off its tits. The book was a huge success and established Ohler in the anglophone world. It was vivid – some would say lurid; it mixed a factual style with a much more popular approach, and attracted some criticism. But it also drew admiration from some serious historians – not least Antony Beevor and Sir Ian Kershaw, both authorities on the era.

Now Ohler has turned his attention to the German resistance with a biography of Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, the glamorous couple at the heart of the Rote Kapelle. The book’s English title is The Bohemians – The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis. It is a big claim. Do the Schulze-Boysens deserve it? What did they achieve?

 Harro Schulze-Boysen was born in 1909 in Kiel, into a family with strong naval links; his father was a naval officer and his great-uncle, who he knew as a child, was Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. It was a patriotic officer-class background, and Harro seems always to have been very much a member of that class all his life, despite the odd twist it would later take. He studied at Freiburg and later at Humboldt University in Berlin. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was running a leftish periodical, Der Gegner (The Opponent), and promoting political discussion; if Ohler is to be believed, he reached out across the political divide.

But in the spring of 1933 Der Gegner was shut down by the Brownshirts and he and a friend, Harry Erlanger, were arrested and very badly beaten. Erlanger died. Schulze-Boysen survived, being released with the help of his young fashion-designer girlfriend, Regine Schütt, who managed to find him and enlisted the help of his family. The latter was well-connected and Harro’s mother got him sprung. But the beatings had damaged his kidneys, which never fully recovered; the SA had also carved a swastika into his thigh.

What Harro Schulze-Boysen did next seems odd, and Ohler never quite explains it. The 24-year-old donned uniform and went off to do a maritime observer’s course at the German Aviation School in Warnemünde. His entry into the course seems to have been organized by his naval-officer father to get him the hell out of Berlin and away from trouble. But Ohler suggests this was also a move by Harro to go into deep cover so that he could continue to resist the regime from within. Probably neither is a full explanation. Neither is it completely clear why Harro suddenly decided to dump Regine Schütt, who had helped get him out of the hands of the Gestapo. Maybe Harro wanted to start with a fresh sheet so as to keep the Gestapo’s eyes off him. At any rate, Schütt disappears from the story and Ohler does not say what became of her. (In fact she became the single mother of a girl not long afterwards; both survived the war and eventually emigrated to Canada, where the daughter became a noted artist.)

Harro went further. On completion of the course he got a job in the Air Ministry, which was expanding rapidly. From now on he was in uniform, becoming a Luftwaffe staff officer. And before long he met 20-year-old Libertas Haas-Heye, an aristocrat from one of Germany’s poshest families – and a Nazi sympathizer. They married, and Libertas was persuaded to abandon the Nazi cause. It may have helped to convince her that Harro had been so badly beaten by the Gestapo that he found it painful to have sex with her.

From then on, the Schulze-Boysens were in it up to their necks.

*

Harro was involved in anti-Nazi plots from about 1935, soon after he joined the Air Ministry. In 1937 he tried to send the Spanish Republicans the names of infiltrators within their ranks. He also established contact with the Soviets and in 1941, at huge risk, he and his associate, senior Government economist Arvid Harnack, managed to warn them about Operation Barbarossa, including attack details and the date, June 22. Their detailed warning was brought to Stalin by Moscow Centre on June 17 1941. Stalin refused to believe it. “Send your ‘source’ back to his whore of a mother,” he scrawled on it. Harro and Harnack continued to supply the Soviets with as much information as they could, although the Soviets appear to have been disorganized and not always helpful.

Harro and Libertas in 1935, a year
before their marriage
(Deutsches Historisches Museum)

It is this connection that has led to Schulze-Boysen’s network being seen as part of the Soviet spy ring, the Rote Kapelle; and after the war the Eastern bloc played up this connection. But while some other members of the group did have Soviet sympathies, there is no evidence that the Schulze-Boysens ever did. Harro’s motivations were different; he realized the Nazis might destroy Germany and opposed them not because he wasn’t patriotic, but because he was. If he helped the Soviets it was because they could hurt Hitler. He also attempted to contact the British to warn them that their naval codes had been broken, and that the Germans knew exactly when their Arctic convoys were sailing and by which route. The economist Arvid Harnack did have some Communist links, but was never a Party member and up to 1940 supplied detailed information on Germany’s war economy to the US State Department via Donald Heath, an American diplomat he knew through his American wife.

Meanwhile Libertas worked in the film industry, initially as a publicist for MGM; later she managed to get a job as a censor in the documentary film department of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Here she collected photographs, letters and other evidence of atrocities from the occupied territories, and compiled them into an archive that she intended to hand to the Allies after the war. She had no shortage of material; some of those at the front were only too pleased to describe how they had done the Fuhrer’s bidding, and Libertas had no problem getting them to tell her more. She was appalled by what she saw. Harro also used it as material for underground flyers. Some of the material was hard to take. One photo that passed through Libertas’s hands showed a family of four, including an infant, being lines up to be shot; one of them, a little girl, has a rag doll and politely stood it in line to be shot, too. Libertas reproduced some of the material at the Ministry itself and smuggled it out for her archive.

The Schulze-Boysens also built up a large circle of fellow-resisters, many from Berlin’s underground bohemia, and organized contacts and assistance for French and other forced labourers. Other activities included the printing and distribution of flyers and widespread stickering of walls and buildings with subversive slogans. In so doing, the couple and their friends became a refuge for many from the nightmare, a place where they could meet kindred spirits, gain a sense of purpose – and feel they were safe, if only for a few hours at a time.

A good account of how one might be drawn into the Schulze-Boysens’ activities is given, not in Ohler’s book, but in an earlier one by Anne Nelson, Red Orchestra (2009). Cato Bontjes van Beek was a 20-year-old potter from Bremen (her family name came from her Dutch father). She had taken up active resistance against the regime after seeing the fate of Jewish neighbours, and met Libertas Schulze-Boysen at a work gathering in Leipzig. They became friends. Not long afterwards Bontjes van Beek met a beautiful art student of her own age, Katja Casella, who appeared badly upset; she found out the Casella was Jewish (a fact she had kept concealed) and had a Jewish fiancé who was in exile. Casella had now found that her fiancé’s mother and sister had been deported to concentration camp. Bontjes van Beek decided to take her to the Schulze-Boysens. Nearly 70 years later, the art student, Katja Casella – by then the only known survivor of the Rote Kapelle – told Nelson what happened:

When they entered the living room, she saw a dozen women sitting quietly, listening to a Bach chaconne on the gramophone. Cato left her for a moment. When she returned, Katja was shocked to see that she was accompanied by a very tall young man in a German officer’s uniform. The lieutenant soberly asked Katja what had happened to her fiancé’s family. Then he folded his arms around her and gave her a strong embrace. “This barbarity has to stop,” he told her. “We all have to work together to stop that devil.” She found his voice warm and reassuring, and she took heart.

From then on Casella, too, was heavily involved in the circle’s activities and, with Bonjes van Beek, helped shelter Jewish fugitives from the regime.

It was never going to end well. In 1941, in an act of quite unbelievable stupidity, the Soviets included the names and addresses of the Schulze-Boysens and their collaborators the Kuckhoffs and Harnacks in a radio message to their agents in Brussels. The message was encoded but in 1942 the Germans arrested the agents and broke their code. In September 1942 the Gestapo hoovered up Schulse-Boysen and Harnack’s entire network. After a perfunctory trial, the Schulze-Boysens were executed in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison on December 22 1942. Harro was hung; Libertas was guillotined in the same shed about an hour later. They were aged just 33 and 29. Nine others, mostly friends or associates of theirs, also died, including Harnack, sculptor Kurt Schumacher and his artist wife Elisabeth. Further executions followed in 1943.

*

Norman Ohler is a good writer. This is a gripping book and an easy read. Ohler manages to have an unusually light touch while still respecting his subjects. He cares about them, has tried to understand them, and brings them alive; you become invested in the Schulze-Boysens and their story, even though you know what their fate will be. Moreover, although he centres on the Schulze-Boysens, he pays plenty of attention to the many who worked with them; in fact there are almost too many characters. This is not the first book about this circle of resisters. Anne Nelson’s, mentioned earlier, was published some years ago and is centred on another couple, the Kuckhoffs, rather than the Schulze-Boysens; Greta Kuckhoff’s own account was published in German in the 1970s. American writer Shareen Blair Brysac’s book on Mildred Harnack, Resisting Hitler, was published in 2002. There have been others. However, Bohemians is likely to introduce the German resistance to a popular readership who have hitherto heard little of it.

Arvid Harnack's American wife, Mildred,
was a crucial link between her husband and
US intelligence 

But there are also some odd things about Bohemians. For instance, Ohler’s use of the present tense throughout the book grates somewhat, though this may have been a translator’s decision. More seriously, he is a little uncritical of the Schulze-Boysens. Their courage is not in doubt – Harro’s, especially; and they did make the supreme sacrifice. But they were amateurs. Not all recent books on the German resistance have been so kind about them. In particular, a recent biography of Harnack’s wife, Mildred (who was American), has been highly critical. The book, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, is by an American writer and academic, Rebecca Donner. Donner is related to Mildred, who was also very active and who played a crucial role in passing Arvid’s economic intelligence to the United States. She was also executed, some months after her husband. Donner presents the Sculze-Boysens as an absolute menace whose actions put the more careful Harnacks in danger.

One wonders if Donner’s quarrel may be at least in part with Ohler, rather than the Schulze-Boysens. Ohler’s book was published a year before hers, and she makes a slighting comment on it in her references, suggesting that it included factual errors; but she says little about what they were. However, she may be at least part-right. For instance she states that Harro had tried to work with Arvid Harnack as early as 1937 but Harnack had sensed that he was too fanatical and potentially careless, and decided to avoid him, changing his mind only after the war had begun. From other sources, this is quite true; Nelson quotes Shareen Blair Brysac as saying that Harnack had been introduced to Harro before the war (Nelson says in 1935) but was unsure of his judgment, and thought it safer not to meet him again.

It’s true that, as a spy, Harro’s tradecraft was awful. He got away with it for years by hiding in plain sight at the heart of the German establishment. However, he let his circle get too big for safety – his, and theirs. This was not simply carelessness; Ohler explains that Harro wanted the resistance circles to expand constantly until opposition to Hitler reached a critical mass. So the Schulze-Boysens encouraged recruits. Ohler states that about 150 people were eventually involved, although it is not clear how he reaches that figure; there were many different interlocking circles, some of which originally had nothing to do with the Schulze-Boysens, and the real number could have been much larger. Harro seems to have been sincere in his welcome to people like Katja Casella, who found in the Schulze-Boysens a refuge from the ugliness outside. He also seems to have had an honest conviction that the circle would widen until it became invincible. But the regime was never going to let that happen.

Harro also had an unwise affair that may have helped lead to his arrest, and that of his friends. This was with an attractive dark-haired actress, Stella Mahlberg. Not much is known of her, except that she was almost certainly the daughter of architect and designer Paul Mahlberg. Although half-Jewish, she had been permitted to continue her career; it is not clear why. Ohler speculates, at the end of the book, that she played a role in shopping the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack circle to the Gestapo, and a postwar American report records that she appeared to have committed suicide in Stuttgart in 1947 when she learned she would be questioned by US intelligence. No-one really knows what her role was, and she may have been blameless. But if she wasn’t, Harro may have walked into a honey-trap. 

Oda Schottmüller, who allowed her
studio to be used for radio transmissions;
she was executed in 1943

As for Libertas, her nerve went towards the end and she became increasingly frightened. In prison, she gave up the names of some co-conspirators to a woman she thought was a sympathizer, hoping she would warn them, but the woman was an informer. There is no evidence this changed anyone’s fate; the prosecutor told interrogators after the war that they had already had all the names – maybe from Mahlberg, but just as likely through months of careful detective work after decoding Moscow’s unwise message. Besides, most people who associated themselves with the Schulze-Boysens, or the other groups they had contacts with, would have understood the risks. But it does seem that security was poor. It did not help that Harro wanted the group to carry out large-scale stickering and distribution of flyers, which were extremely dangerous and which Moscow discouraged, preferring to receive hard military information from inside Germany. These efforts alarmed Cato Bontjes van Beek’s partner; feeling that Harro was taking a risk too many, he asked her to withdraw from the group.

It would not save Bontjes van Beek; she too would be swept up in the Gestapo dragnet and would be executed some months after Harro and Libertas, at the age of 22. Others would include the beautiful dancer and sculptress Oda Schottmüller, who had lent Harro her studio for a clandestine radio broadcast; she was also executed in September 1943. The young Jewish artist, Katja Casella, would be one of the very few survivors. Hearing of the first arrests in September 1942, she fled into hiding in Poland. She would be reunited with her fiancé after the war, and would go on to a successful artistic career; the last known survivor of the Rote Kapelle, she died in Berlin in 2012.

*

In retrospect, the Rote Kappelle and the other German resistance groups do not seem to have achieved much. Harnack and Harro’s one major coup was to warn Stalin of Barbarossa, but it was to no avail because Stalin was an idiot. Attempts to contact the British and warn them their ciphers had been breached also failed. A later effort to make contact with Britain via Sweden also came to nought, apparently because the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had no wish to deal with the German resistance. Looking back, he had reasons for this; the resistance’s objectives, at least those of people like Schulze-Boysen and von Stauffenberg, was to decapitate the regime and make peace while Germany was still intact. But it’s not hard to see why the British would have preferred to see Germany completely destroyed this time, so that history would not repeat itself. This would also prevent a repetition of the insidious “stab in the back” myth, by which some Germans of the inter-war period were persuaded by the Right that they had been defeated only by treason within.

Neither is there any evidence that the circle’s propaganda activity had much effect, other than alarming the regime (though it certainly did that). Most recipients of such efforts would simply have turned them over to the Gestapo. This is what happened with the postcards distributed by a working-class Berlin couple, the Hampels, who were eventually caught and executed (a story later told, in fictional form, by the writer Hans Fallada in Every Man Dies Alone). If one wished, one could argue that the only result of Schulze-Boysens’ activities was to salve their own consciences and get other people, like Bontjes van Beek and Schottmüller, killed. Ohler does not really confront these questions in Bohemians. Much as I liked the book, I felt that he should have done.

Memorial plaque to the Schulze-Boysens outside their
apartment atAltenburger Allee 19, Berlin
(Axel Mauruszat/Wikimedia Commons)

But maybe the Schulze-Boysens’ flaws aren’t what matters today; it’s the fact that they felt they should act. They must have asked the terrible questions: If not us, who? If not now, when? They paid a ghastly price, as they knew they might. They were not alone. Although only a minority of Germans took part in the resistance, a surprising number were involved in some way. Anne Nelson quotes the writer Eric Boehm, who fled the country as a teenager (he was Jewish) and returned in 1945 as a US intelligence officer; he went on to document some of the resisters and estimated that, of 3 million Germans imprisoned between 1933-45, about 800,000 were arrested for overtly anti-Nazi activities and that less than half, about 300,000, survived the war. Other sources record that even before the July 1944 plot, nearly 10,000 German soldiers had been shot for refusing to follow orders.

It is hard to verify all this, and it remains very political. It suited the Allies to play down the story of the German resistance after the war, and I believe we have all done so since, not least because the vision of Germans as monolithically evil reinforces our own self-image. “It couldn’t happen here,” we have smugly said. As it happens, it didn’t – but does that mean it never could? It’s certainly true that Germans of that generation had some terrible questions to answer. But Germans were not a separate species. Nothing they did absolves the rest of us from anything we may have done, or might do in the future. Perhaps in the end, the real achievement of the German resistance is that it confirms that shared humanity; good, like evil, knows no borders.

In Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, one of the characters makes an oblique reference to Genesis 18: 26-32: The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

It is said that Libertas cried out for her mother as she was led to the guillotine. The day after her execution, her mother, unaware of her death, tried to deliver a package of Christmas gifts for her.

Since 1980 there has been a German Resistance Memorial Centre (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) in Berlin. It has an English section to its website that is worth a visit. The Centre also maintains the execution shed at Plötzensee as a permanent memorial.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.

The Polish Anne Frank

There will be few more memoirs of the Holocaust from the living. But there may yet be more from the dead. Renia Spiegel’s diary is an important work of witness. It is also a love story

The Second World War ended 75 years ago, and there are now few people alive who lived through it as adults. They won’t write more books. What does come to light, now and then, is a manuscript in a trunk – or a diary.

Renia Spiegel kept one until she was murdered by the Gestapo in Poland in 1942, aged just 18. Her diary was brought to the US by a survivor some time in the 1950s, and eventually reached Renia’s surviving sister, Elizabeth Bellak. She could not bear to read it, and it lay in a safe-deposit box in New York for 40-odd years. Then Bellak’s daughter, Alexandra Renata Bellak, persuaded her to let it be translated into English. The project also had the encouragement of filmmaker Tomasz Magierski, who has since made a documentary, Broken Dreams, about Renia and her sister. Renia’s Diary has now been published in English.

Like Anne Frank’s diary, it’s full of the musings of a girl growing up; boys, friends, crushes, introspection, the trials of adolescence. But, like Anne’s, it’s also an historical document – in some ways a remarkable one. It keeps alive a young woman who was highly intelligent and well-read, and was also a vivid and thoughtful poet.

*

In 1918 Poland emerged as an independent state for the first time since the 18th century, formed from the wreckage of the empires around it. The new state fell into conflict with the newborn USSR, which nearly succeeded in snuffing it out. In the end, however, the Poles inflicted a heavy defeat on the Red Army. In March 1921 the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, by which Poland acquired some of what is now Belarus, and a large part of modern Ukraine, running south to the Romanian border. It was in the latter region that Renia Spiegel was born in 1924.

Although not originally assigned to Poland at the Paris Peace Conference, the region did contain Poles as well as Ukrainians. The two populations were intermingled. They would come into conflict after 1945, but between the wars they seem to have lived together happily enough. Renia was Polish. She was also Jewish.

When Renia was very young her parents acquired a manor house and farm at Stavki, on the Dniester River, not far from the border with Romania – again, in the region that Poland had acquired from the USSR in 1921. It seems to have been an idyllic childhood. It is not clear what went wrong to end this, but at some point her parents split up, apparently as a result of Renia’s father’s affair with another woman. Her mother left to tour Poland with Renia’s younger sister, Ariana (now Elizabeth Bellak), who was making a career in film as “the Polish Shirley Temple”. Renia found herself parked with her grandparents in Przemyśl, a former Austro-Hungarian garrison town on the San River some way to the west. (Przemyśl, unlike Stavki, is still in Poland.)

The city had had a difficult recent history, having undergone a long siege by Russian forces during the First World War; it eventually fell. Many of its people were Jewish. They had been there a long time. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, founded in Vilnius between the wars and now based in New York City, records that a Jewish community began to establish itself in Przemyśl as early as the 13th century. By the late 18th century they were a quarter of the city’s population. But there were anti-Jewish riots in the city in the 16th to 18th centuries. Despite this, the YIVO Institute estimates that nearly 30% of the city’s population was Jewish by 1910. They were driven out by the Tsarist forces after the city fell in March1915, but returned when they left – and they were afterwards as much as 38.8% of the population. The Institute also states that the Jewish community won 18 of the 48 seats on the city’s council in 1926. According to the Holocaust Research Project, they accounted for as many as 24,000 out of the 60,000-odd prewar population. But there was continuing antisemitism, expressed at times through boycotts of Jewish businesses.

The siege of Przemyśl (Artist unknown)

We don’t know to what extent Renia would have known all this, or cared. We do know that she was not ecstatic at being dumped on her grandparents in Przemyśl. In her first diary entry, dated January 31 1939, when she was 14, Renia laments in a poem the loss of the peaceful manor at Stavki:

Again the need to cry takes over me
When I recall the days that used to be
The linden trees, house, storks and butterflies
...The wind that used to lull old trees

But in this first entry, just like Anne Frank, she also describes the girls in her class, rather frankly and with a certain relish. There’s Irka (“I don’t like Irka and it’s in my blood”) and Luna (“she thinks of herself as a very talented and unearthly creature”), and Ninka, who’s quite nice but “arranges meetings in dark streets, visits lonely men and is proud of it”. Meanwhile Renia and her best friend Norka have a crush on the Latin teacher.

Yet this is a very different diary from Anne Frank’s in one key respect: Anne was locked up in the secret annex in Amsterdam. She heard the radio and was aware of the progress of the war; in fact, she records surprising details – for example that Churchill had had pneumonia and that Gandhi was again on hunger strike; the BBC must have been franker about these things than one expects. She also kept up with the news of the occupation outside. But she was not part of it. Renia, by contrast, was out in the world. But she did not know what was coming. So we see the situation around her unfolding much as a Pole would have, in the first half of the war.

Renia’s Diary has a concise and thoughtful foreword by the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, in which she points out the difference between a memoir and a diary; the author of the first knows how the story ends, whereas the diarist does not. “A survivor may recount the details of an event in order to stress a particular point, a point whose importance only became evident to her well after the fact,” says Lipstadt. Thus Renia is desperately miserable at being with her grandparents and losing Stavki; if she had known what was to come, these would have been the least of her problems.

Anne Frank’s diaries are different in that she did know all too well what her fate might be; as early as October 9 1942 she wrote that “English radio” was saying that Jews were being transported to be gassed. “Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die,” she mused. But Anne too didn’t know for certain what lay ahead. Renia had even less idea, strengthening Lipstadt’s comment that diaries give a different perspective sometimes; the diarist sees the tragedy unfolding in real time, without knowing how it will end. Thus in April 1939 Renia writes a witty poem for her little sister. A few days later she does describe the slightly farcical air-raid precautions being organised as Przemyśl prepares for a gas attack. But she is more worried about her chemistry class.

All that changed on September 1 1939, when Germany attacked Poland. As Przemyśl was overrun, Renia, her younger sister Ariana and their grandfather fled eastwards on foot to Lwów, the major city of south-east Poland (today Lviv in Ukraine). They walked for three days. On September 18 1939:

We’ve been in Lwów for almost a week… The city is surrounded. Food is in short supply. Sometimes I get up at dawn and stand in a long line to get bread. Apart from that, we’ve been spending all day in a bunker, a cellar, listening to the terrible whistling of bullets and explosions of bombs. God, please save us.

On the 22nd, Lwów surrendered – not to the Germans, but to the Red Army. As part of the Nazi-Soviet Pact a few weeks earlier, the Hitler and Stalin had cynically agreed to carve up Poland between them; Germany would take the western half and the USSR would occupy the east, including the territories it had lost to Poland after its ill-advised war against the country in 1920-21.

Renia records that Warsaw, and some Poles in Lwów, were still fighting. The September war is sometimes a footnote in the history-books, and it was indeed short. But the Polish resistance was, in fact, very stiff. A country with indefensible borders, invaded on two fronts by two enormous neighbours, it fought for only a month. But during that month, it extracted a heavy price from its invaders. The Germans lost 285 aircraft, not many less than the Poles themselves. About 20,000 German soldiers were killed or missing, and quite a lot of their armour was destroyed. Poland never actually surrendered.

*

Renia, Ariana and her grandparents returned to Przemyśl. But their home was not in German-occupied Poland. It was in the Russian sector, and the border with the German-run General Government ran along the River San – right through the centre of Przemyśl. Their city had been cut in half. As they could not cross the bridge to the German zone, they were cut off from Renia’s mother, who was in Warsaw.

For a Jewish family, the Russian zone was a much better place to be. They appear not to have been discriminated against. They may even have been better off than they had been in some ways; Renia went so far as to write in her diary that people couldn’t call her “you lousy yid” any more (the implication being that they had before). Before long, things seem to have been oddly normal; she returned to school, and went on going to parties, worrying about her lessons and having crushes. She was even able to travel to see her father, who was also in the Russian zone – although his estate had been confiscated, he was safe. But communication with her mother in the German zone was difficult and potentially dangerous. On October 27 1939 she writes: “We haven’t heard from her. I had a terrible dream that she’s dead. I know it’s not possible. I cry all the time...”

Russian officers in Przemyśl, October 1 1939 (Photographer unknown)

But in fact Renia’s mother was alive. She seems to have had both charm and wit, because with the help of friends, she managed to secure fake papers as a Catholic woman, and found a job as assistant manager of the Europejski – which was, and is, one of Warsaw’s poshest hotels.

Meanwhile the Russian occupation, benign for Renia, was much less so for others. Many Poles, both soldiers and civilians, had been taken prisoner, and the following spring the NKVD murdered more than 20,000 of them in the notorious Katyn massacre, disposing of many of Poland’s officers, intellectuals, businessmen and landowners. Many Polish prisoners who were not killed were shipped to the USSR, where the authorities kept some in prison camps and seem simply to have lost track of others. (Many would eventually leave the USSR under General Anders and fight alongside the British in Italy.) Renia seems to have been aware of at least some of what the Russians were doing. On April 24 1940 – actually during the Katyn massacres, though she did not know of them – she wrote that: “Terrible things have been happening. People were rounded up and sent somewhere deep inside Russia. ...There was terrible screaming at school. Girls were crying.”

Meanwhile Jews who had fled across the San from the German zone seem to have fared little better; the Russians deported them. On July 6 1940 Renia records that they had come in the night to arrest people in the house opposite. “The arrests were led by some fat hag who kept yelling in Russian… They were told the journey would take four weeks. ...Poor refugees from the other side of the San. They are being taken to Birobidzhan.” It is not clear how Renia knew this, but she was probably right. Birobidzhan was, and remains, an autonomous Jewish oblast in Russia’s far east, on the border with Manchuria. The Soviets had attempted to start a Jewish homeland there, with mixed results. The YIVO Institute states that about 7,000 Jews from Przemyśl were deported to Russia during this period.

Renia knew, of course, that the war was still being fought, in the West and North Africa, but does not seem to have followed it as closely as Anne Frank and her family, who clustered round the radio just outside their secret annexe. But Renia did make her feelings about the war known. On October 12 1940 she writes, apparently of war in general:

Who is stifled, killed, destroyed by you
forever remains free
...those who’re alive have broken hearts
...you howl, you infuriated beast,
“more, I want blood to fill my snout.”

*

Anne Frank and Renia Spiegel were very different, and their situations were different too. Anne had a more supportive family. When they went into hiding in the Secret Annexe, she found that her father had brought her postcard and movie-star collection there beforehand, a thoughtful and loving gesture; and her mother tried to care for her though Anne was indifferent to her. In this sense it was harder for Renia, whose father had gone off with someone else and whose mother was in Warsaw and had been absent for years anyway, touring with Renia’s younger sister Ariana.

There was also a difference in their sense of identity. According to Ariana (later Elizabeth Bellak), the family went to synagogue and observed the major holidays, but was not especially religious. Renia was certainly aware of being Jewish, and later passages in the diary show that she was very aware of anti-semitism. But she does not seem to have seen being Jewish as something that defined her. Anne Frank didn’t either, but seems to have thought more about being Jewish, as a result of her family’s experience in Germany. ““Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I’m actually one of them!” she wrote. “No, that’s not true. Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and the Jews.”

They had different personalities. Anne described herself as a chatterbox. In the very last entry of her diary, on August 1 1944, she writes: “I’m guided by the pure Anne within, but on the outside I’m nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether.” One gets the feeling that her father saw the Anne inside but that others around her did not. Renia seems to have been more intense. But her pictures usually show her smiling, and maybe they were more similar than their diaries suggest.

Certainly they both had a deep need to express themselves in writing – and both were very good at it. Anne was the more imaginative prose writer (and wrote a number of stories while in hiding). She also eventually realised her diary might be published, after hearing a Dutch minister in exile, Gerrit Bolkestein, say in a radio broadcast that evidence such as diaries would be wanted after the war. Renia had no notion that her diary would be published, and it is entirely confessional; she complains of her family and her girlfriends and her social failures, and at times, to be honest, there can be too much of it – this was a teenager’s diary and was not intended to be read.

But Renia had a talent Anne does not show so much, at least in her diaries: as we’ve seen, she was a poet, and rather a good one. It helps that the poems in Renia’s Diary seem to have been beautifully translated (the translators were Anna Blasiak and Marta Dziurosz). They do make one wonder what might have followed had she had a lifetime to write. On June 18 1939:

If a man had wings
If souls could be in all things
The world would lose its temper
The sun would shower us with embers
The people would dance beyond the beyond
Shouting, more! We want to abscond!
What we need is wind and speed
The world is dark, stifling, squeezed

In one key respect, besides their desire to write, these two girls were similar – both were sexual beings, and expressed this in their diaries. Some of this would be excised in the early editions of Anne Frank’s diary, but is now restored. Thus on January 6 1944 she writes of a friend: “I could no longer restrain my curiosity about her body, which she’d always hidden from me ...I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy. ...If only I had a girlfriend!” This has been used to suggest that Anne may have been a lesbian – but she was only 13 when she went into hiding, and 15 when she wrote that passage. Moreover she was just about to become strongly attracted to Peter van Daan, who lived in the annexe with her. We don’t know if she would have been lesbian or bisexual. Still, she had erotic feelings and now and then expressed them.

Renia did so much more strongly. This is evident in several of her poems. One, for instance, seems to be a reference to masturbation. Then on June 15 1942, the 18-year-old Renia writes:

A bloody spring fruit you resemble
My body embraced by hips, I groan
My chest billows restlessly, I moan
...I will absorb you, I will writhe and adore,
I will kiss you like a lithe whore
A real one, real and alight.

It would be prurient to dwell on this when it is only one part of Renia’s personality. But it is a part of her story, because there was no doubt about whom she was writing; Renia Spiegel was in love. 

Some time in September or October 1940 she had formed an attachment to Zygmunt Schwarzer. Zygu, as Renia calls him in the diary, was a doctor’s son from Jarosław, a city not far away and also on the San river, but under German occupation; the family had thus fled to Przemyśl. Aged 17 in 1940, Zygu was a year older than Renia and according to Elizabeth Bellak, he was very handsome.

One of the huge strengths of Renia’s Diary is the commentary that Bellak has provided in the back of the book. Matched to the diary by date, it explains events that would otherwise be puzzling, date by date, giving essential background. It is warm, gentle and humane, and seems full of love for the sister she last saw when she was 11 and Renia herself just 18. Bellak has no doubt that her sister was in love. According to Bellak, Zygu had “black, curly hair, bright green eyes, and dimples on the sides of his cheeks that got deeper every time he smiled – which was a lot. ...I always felt warm and comfortable around him.”

There is no doubt how Renia herself felt. On March 12 1941:

I’ll be such a daydreamer
A fantastic, poetic wife
I’ll watch the sky a-shimmer
And count stars all my life...
Fragrant ambrosia I will stew
I’ll dust with clouds, mend clothes with sunrays
...What matters is your eyes, your life
And your brow, unclouded, under your hat
So, tell me, Zygu ...Do you want a wife like that?

The course of true love didn’t run smooth. Perhaps at that age it never does. The diary is peppered with doubts; he was dragged away by someone else; he was not here this evening; he loves me, he loves me not. Now and then friends got in the way. Schwarzer’s good friend Maciek Tuchman seemed to be in love with her too. (“He walks me home ...constantly has something to whisper in my ear, or a speck to brush off me”). But slowly Renia and Zygu drew together. On June 21 1941 Renia wrote that they had kissed amongst the pine trees. In the early hours of June 22, she later recorded, he blew her a kiss as she stood on the balcony, watching him walk away; a Montague slipping away from his Capulet love. 

Then four hours later a shot rang out. The war between Germany and Russia had begun. War needed more blood to fill its snout.

*

Things changed quickly.

On July 1 1941: “Tomorrow, along with other Jews, I’ll have to start wearing a white armband. ...to others I will become someone inferior, I will become someone wearing a white armband with a blue star. I will be a Jude.” Ariana (Bellak) also felt this deeply, although she was only 10 and did not need to wear an armband herself. “When I first saw one, something in me died,” she wrote nearly 80 years later. “My family and friends and neighbors who wore them weren’t people anymore. They were objects.” Renia herself records on July 28 1941 that: “Yesterday I saw Jews being beaten. Some monstrous Ukrainian in a German uniform hit every one he met. He hit and kicked them, and we were helpless, so weak, so incapable ...We had to take it all in silence.” On August 16: “Why is Mom not writing, why is there no sign from her? ...Why do we live in fear of searches and arrests? Why can’t we go for a walk, because ‘children’ throw stones?” On August 28: “It’s necessary for us to walk with our heads lowered now, to run along streets, to shiver. For the meanest streetwalker to provoke and insult me in Zygu’s presence and he can’t help me, or I him.” This is followed by a poem that is uncharacteristic for Renia, for it is with filled with bile.

Streetwalker with a nasty grin
today you bully, yell and curse
...you, flowing here on gutter’s scum
from what is lowest, rotten, vile
the only homeland you have got
is a pile of trash and a lustful smile

But on July 28 she had written that: “Every morning whole troops of wounded Germans walk past. And… I’m sorry for them. I’m sorry for those young, tired boys, far away from their homeland, mother, wife, perhaps children...”

Slowly he walks, harried and weak
a soldier, look, how young
wounded in hand, or in arm, hard to speak
his uniform hangs from his arm.

...This is the fate, it’s the life
and who can explain to me why
I curse the thousands and millions
And for the one wounded, I cry?

Reading that, one is filled with rage that this young woman did not survive.

But she didn’t. In July 1942 the Germans designated a part of Przemyśl as a ghetto and forced all the city’s Jewish people into it. Shortly afterwards they allocated work permits to those those they thought might be useful, and took the rest away. Some were sent to an extermination camp at Bełżec near Lwów. Others, probably including Renia and Ariana’s grandparents, were taken into the countryside and shot. Neither Renia nor Zygmunt Schwarzer’s parents had work permits. In actions that must have taken insane courage, Schwarzer first smuggled Ariana across the San to the family of a Christian friend, then hid Renia and his parents in an uncle’s house. Then the father of Ariana’s Christian playmate, also with great courage, got her to Warsaw, where her mother arranged false papers for her; they made their way westwards near the end of the war, and eventually emigrated to New York.

Renia was not so lucky. The Gestapo found her, and Schwarzer’s parents. Bellak does not say how, but in a memoir published nearly 70 years later, Schwarzer’s friend Maciek Tuchman said they were betrayed by the building janitor; he did not know why. They were shot there and then. It was July 30 1942.

*

Tomasz Magierski's film about the
Spiegel sisters, Broken Dreams

The Holocaust Research Project states that, of the 24,000 Jews living in Przemyśl before the war, just 300 survived. Other sources put it a little higher, but not much. The YIVO Institute records that there were some 22,000 Jews in the Przemyśl ghetto when it was closed off in July 1942; about 10,000 were deported to Bełżec at about the time Renia was murdered, and had she not gone into hiding she would have gone with them anyway. The remainder of the ghetto was liquidated between September 1943 and February 1944. According to the YIVO Institute, some limited Jewish life did restart after the war but by the beginning of the 21st century, only a ‘handful’ of Jews remained in the city.

The best revenge is to survive and thrive. Both Schwarzer and Tuchman survived the war, though not easily; Schwarzer went to Auschwitz, while Tuchman went to Birkenau and worked as a slave-labourer for Siemens. In 1945, as refugees, they were offered the chance to study by UNRRA, and studied medicine in, of all places, Germany – in the ancient university town of Heidelberg. In his memoir (Remember: My Stories of Survival and Beyond, Yad Vashem, 2010), Tuchman explains that they didn’t really have anywhere else to go; even the US was taking a restricted number of displaced persons, and Israel did not yet exist. They formed a vibrant community of Jewish students in Heidelberg, many of whom went on to successful careers.

They included Tuchman and Schwarzer, who eventually reached the United States. Both married and had children. Tuchman practiced medicine in New York for many years and died there in 2018, aged 96. Zygmunt Schwarzer became a paediatrician. Tuchman records that after service in the US Air Force, Schwarzer practised in New York, where he developed an interest in, and published on, the infectious diseases of children. Ariana – Elizabeth Bellak – also remained in the US and still lives there. In her commentary on the Diary, she writes: ”It’s been almost 80 years since I last saw my sister. That’s a lifetime since I saw her looking up from one of her leather notebooks, her bright blue eyes shining... Yet her presence is one of the largest in my life.”

As for Schwarzer, at times in the Diary Renia seems to doubt his love, or to worry about his feelings for her; but she was wrong. Bellak records that he kept photocopies of the Diary in the basement of his Long Island home, and that every few days he would go down to look at them. In 1989 – 47 years after Renia’s death – he wrote the following words in the back of the original Diary: ”Thanks to Renia I fell in love for the first time in my life, deeply and sincerely. ...It was an amazing, delicate emotion ...I can’t express how much I love her. And it will never change until the end.”

He died three years later, aged 69.

In 2015 Elizabeth Bellak started the Renia Spiegel Foundation, the objective of which is to promote tolerance and Polish culture, and keep Renia’s story alive for future generations. It can be found at http://www.reniaspiegelfoundation.org/.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.