Ukrainian teenager Stefan Kurylak was shipped westwards by the German occupiers to labour for an Austrian Alpine farming family, devout Catholics named Klaunzer. On first sighting the boy, Frau Klaunzer burst into tears; without knowing why, the young Ukrainian followed suit. It was explained to him that the Klaunzers’ son had been killed on the Eastern Front a few weeks before. Frau Klaunzer kept mouthing one of the few German phrases Stefan could understand: ‘Hitler no good! Hitler no good!’ Stefan was thereafter treated with kindness and humanity: he worked on the family land, not unhappily, until the end of the war, when his hosts begged him in vain to stay on as one of themselves.
Few such experiences were so benign. Fourteen-year-old Pole Arthur Poznaski returned to the Piotrków ghetto one day in October 1942 from the Hortensja glassworks where he and his younger brother Jerzyk worked. He was handed a crumpled note by a member of the ghetto’s Jewish militia. It was from his mother. There had been a deportation: ‘We are being taken. May God help you, Arthur. We cannot do anything more for you, and whatever may happen, look after Jerzyk. He is but a child and has got no one else, so be his brother and parent. Goodbye …’ Arthur, passionately moved, kept repeating to himself, ‘I’ll try! Yes, I’ll try!’ But he thought, ‘How? I felt so lonely and helpless.’ The boys spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, separated by hundreds of miles, but both miraculously survived; the rest of their family perished.
The British endured six years of austerity and spasmodic bombardment. The night blackout promoted moral as well as physical gloom. Yet the circumstances of Churchill’s islands were much preferable to those of Continental societies, where hunger and violence were endemic. Like North America, Britain was shielded by expanses of sea, relative personal freedom and wealth. Privileged Britons remained privileged indeed: ‘The extraordinary thing about the war was that people who really didn’t want to be involved in it were not,’ the novelist Anthony Powell wrote afterwards.
This was true, within a limited social milieu. The week before D-Day, as 250,000 young American and British soldiers made final preparations for hurling themselves at Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, in London Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary: ‘Woke half drunk and had a long, busy morning – getting my hair cut, trying to verify quotations in the London Library, which is still in disorder from its bomb, visiting Nancy [Mitford, at her bookshop]. At luncheon I again got drunk. Went to the Beefsteak [Club], which I have just joined … Back to White’s [Club] – more port. Went to Waterloo in an alcoholic stupor, got the train to Exeter and slept most of the way.’
Waugh was untypical; many of the friends with whom he caroused were on leave from active service, and several were dead a year later. The German V-weapon assault was about to commence, inflicting fresh death and destruction on war-weary Britons. But, just as life in New York or Chicago was much more comfortable than life in London or Liverpool, so Londoners were vastly better off than the inhabitants of Paris, Naples, Athens, any city in the Soviet Union or China. Lancashire housewife Nella Last reflected in October 1942 that her war had thus far inflicted little hardship or suffering, ‘in comparison to three-quarters of Stalingrad being demolished during the first bombardment. We have had food, shelter and warmth when millions have had none – what will be the price we will have to pay? – we cannot expect to go on “escaping”, there is no escape for any of us. I saw a neighbour’s baby today and I felt a sudden understanding for those who “refuse to bring babies into the world now”. All this talk of “new worlds” and “after the war”, no talk of the suffering, the anguish, before all this is over.’
Mrs Last was unusually sensitive; most of her compatriots were too preoccupied by their own present troubles to concern themselves with the larger but remote miseries of others. On 22 November 1942, housewife Phyllis Crook wrote to her thirty-two-year-old husband serving in North Africa: ‘Christmas is going to be a beastly time and I’m hating the thought of it. However it’s got to be got on with “as usual” and I have been busy trying hard to get things for all the kids of our acquaintance. It would be so easy to say “I can’t get anything” and leave it at that. It is so cold … How I wish I could retire for the winter instead of constantly shivering. Chris [their small son] asked God to make you a good boy tonight! Well my love news seems very scarce and I must say goodnight. Life seems too mouldy for words. I wonder when we shall see you again. It all seems horribly far away and doesn’t bear too much thinking about. Look after yourself, my dear and don’t go going into any danger, as Daddy would say! All my love always, dearest Phil. PS Joyce is now working in a factory 11 hours a day. John Young has had malaria.’
Mrs Crook’s woes would seem trivial, her self-pity contemptible, to many people of war-ravaged nations. Her own life and those of her children were unimperilled, and they were not even hungry. But separation from her husband, the necessity to occupy lodgings far from her east London home, the drab monotony of wartime existence seemed to her, like many others, sufficient causes for unhappiness. And ten days after writing that letter she became a widow, when her husband was killed in action.
News of the violent and premature deaths of distant loved ones was a pervasive feature of the wartime experience. Often, little was known of their fate, as J.R. Ackerley noted in a poem published in the Spectator:
We never knew what became of him, that was so curious;
He embarked, it was in December, and never returned;
No chance to say Good-bye, and Christmas confronting us;
A few letters arrived, long after, and came to an end.
The weeks dragged into months, and then it was December.
We troubled the officials, of course, and they cabled about;
They were patient but busy, importunities without number;
Some told us one thing, some another; they never found out.
There’s a lot go like that, without explanation;
And death is death, after all; small comfort to know how and when;
But I keep thinking now that we’ve dropped the investigation;
It was more like the death of an insect than of a man.
Countless families struggled to come to terms with loss. British Army officer’s wife Diana Hopkinson described a reunion with her husband on a station platform in Berkshire, after a long separation during which they received news that his brother had been killed in action. ‘His strange uniform, his strangely thin face glimpsed in the dimmest light, gave me a feeling of artificiality. Even in our kisses there was something unreal. In bed there was a terrible sadness to overcome – Pat’s death – before we could make love. When at last he turned towards me, we made love as if we were partners in a solemn rite, strange, speechless, but familiar.’
Sheffield housewife Edie Rutherford was just preparing tea when her young neighbour, the wife of an RAF pilot, knocked on the door. ‘Her face was wooden and she jerked out: “Mrs Rutherford, Henry is missing,” thrust the telegram into my hand. Of course I just opened my arms and took her in and let her have a good weep the while I cursed audibly this blasted war. “He isn’t dead. I’m sure he isn’t dead. He was home only last Wednesday. He’s alive somewhere and worrying because he knows I’ll get this telegram to upset me” … It is difficult to know what to say to a wife in such trouble. I did my best, poor lass. Felt myself as if my inside had fallen out. I wish to goodness this war would end.’
Housewife Jean Wood recorded: ‘I had a very nice lady and her husband, neighbours. She was having her son on leave and she didn’t have any meat for him. But that particular day the butcher let me have some rabbit … a taste treat. I didn’t want the rabbit, ’cause I’d rather give my small children an egg, if I could get eggs. So I took the rabbit round to her. She was so thrilled. On that particular day, her son was killed. We could have flung the rabbit anywhere, for all we cared. He was such a nice boy, a young officer, nineteen years old.’ They were all ‘nice boys’, to those obliged to mourn them.
Muriel Green, one of
Britain’s 80,000 ‘land girls’ providing agricultural labour, burst into tears on the last night of a home leave in Norfolk in June 1942. ‘I cried because of the war. It has altered our life which can never be the same. To see the desolate emptiness of the seaside upsets me. When you are away and Mother writes to say the latest desecration, the latest boy missing, the latest family to sacrifice, it is just words. But in the home it is mortifying. Life will never be so sweet as before the war, and the last two summers and early ’39 were the most perfect years of my life when all seemed young and gay. I could have cried for hours had I not known it was upsetting Mother.’
American Dellie Hahne was one of many women who married the wrong man amid the stress and emotional extravagance of the time, and repented at leisure during the years that followed. ‘He was a soldier. He could not be anything but a marvelous, magnificent human being,’ she said, with the ruefulness of one who learned better. She came to pity others who experienced domestic miseries: ‘Pregnant women who could barely balance in a rocking train, going to see their husbands for the last time before the guys were sent overseas. Women coming back from seeing their husbands, traveling with small children. Trying to feed their kids, diaper their kids. I felt sorriest for them. It suddenly occurred to me that this wasn’t half as much fun as I’d been told it was going to be. I just thanked God I had no kids.’
Many children clung to parting memories of fathers from whom they became separated for years – in some cases forever. Little Californian Bernice Schmidt was nine when her parents got divorced. As a newly single man, her thirty-two-year-old father Arthur thus became eligible to be drafted. He was given leave from training camp before embarkation, and took his three children to a Los Angeles amusement park. He told them how homesick he was, and gave each a little parting present: Bernice’s was a pin in the shape of two hearts held together with an arrow, inscribed ‘Bernice, love daddy’. Pfc Schmidt was killed in action with the 317th Infantry on 15 November 1944. His daughter never forgot the day that news came, because it was her twelfth birthday. One day in October 1942, Nella Last was gazing at a neighbour’s children. Their mother touched her arm and asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’ Mrs Last said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Always be glad that your Ian is only seven.’ The woman said simply, ‘I am.’
Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma. ‘Is it possible that one can get used to war?’ mused Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, the elderly wife of an academic living in Hamburg, in 1941. ‘This question tantalises me and I am afraid of a positive reply. All that was unbearable at first, all that was impossible to fathom, has by now become somehow “settled”, and one lives from day to day in frightening apathy … We still have our comforts and warmth, we have enough to eat, we occasionally have hot water, we do not exert ourselves apart from daily shopping expeditions and small household duties.’ Like all Germans except National Socialist functionaries, who enjoyed privileges in food as everything else, she complained chiefly about the dreariness of rations: ‘One grows ever more sensitive to the emptiness inside and greed for the unobtainable becomes ever more intense,’ Wolff-Monckeburg wrote in June 1942. ‘Glowing fantasies multiply in tantalising colours when one thinks of large juicy beefsteaks, new potatoes and long asparagus with lumps of golden butter. It is all so degrading and miserable – and there are people who call this a “heroic” period.’ But if Germans complained of privation, this was slight by global standards: whereas British output of consumer goods fell by 45 per cent between 1939 and 1944, Germany’s declined only by 15 per cent. If its people disliked what they were obliged to eat – their annual consumption of potatoes rose from twelve to thirty-two million tons – they experienced severe hunger only when the war ended in May 1945; the Nazis starved the conquered nations to keep their own citizens fed.
More than any other aspect of the war, food or lack of it emphasised the relativity of suffering. Globally, far more people suffered serious hunger, or indeed died of starvation, than in any previous conflict, including World War I, because an unprecedented range of countries became battlefields, with consequent loss of agricultural production. Even the citizens of those countries which escaped famine found their diets severely restricted. Britain’s rationing system ensured that no one starved and the poor were better nourished than in peacetime, but few found anything to enjoy about their fare. A land girl, Joan Ibbertson, wrote: ‘Food was our obsession … In my first digs the landlady never cooked a second vegetable, except on a Sunday; we had cold meat on Monday, and sausage for the rest of the week. Sometimes she cooked potatoes with the sausage, but often she left us a slice of bread each. The two sausages on a large, cold, green glass plate greeted us on our return from a day on leeks or sprouts, and a three-mile cycle ride each way … A neighbour once brought round a sack of carrots, which he said were for the rabbits, but we benefited from this act of kindness … We had dried eggs once a week for breakfast, but the good lady in charge liked to cook it overnight, so it resembled, and tasted like, sawdust on toast. We had fishpaste on toast, too, some mornings … One Christmas we were allowed to buy a chicken. My bird was so old and tough that we could hardly chew through it.’
Each week a British adult was entitled to four ounces of lard or butter, twelve ounces of sugar, four ounces of bacon, two eggs, six ounces of meat, two ounces of tea and unlimited vegetables or home-grown fruit ‘off-ration’, if available. Most households resorted to improvisation to supplement authorised issues. Derek Lambert, then a small boy, recorded a scene at his family’s table: ‘One morning a jar was put on the breakfast table with supreme nonchalance … My father, an undemonstrative man, spread the nectar on his bread and bit into it. He frowned and said: “What was that?” “Carrot marmalade,” said my mother. With unusual deliberation, he picked up the jar, took it into the garden and poured it onto the compost heap.’
Yet any Russian or Asian peasant, or Axis captive, would have deemed carrot marmalade a luxury. Kenneth Stevens was a prisoner in Singapore’s Changi jail. He wrote: ‘In this place one’s mind returns continually and dwells longingly on Food … I think of Duck and Cherry Casserole, Scrambled Eggs, Fish Scallops, Chicken Stanley, Kedgeree, Trifle, Summer Pudding, Fruit Fool, Bread & Butter Pudding – all those lovely things were made just perfectly “right” in my own home.’ Stevens died in August 1943 without ever again tasting such delicacies. Only in 1945 did his wife receive his diary from the hands of a fellow prisoner, and share his anguished fantasising from the brink of the grave. Meanwhile, the average height of French girl children shrank by eleven centimetres and of boys by seven centimetres between 1935 and 1944. Tuberculosis stimulated by malnutrition increased dramatically in occupied Europe, and by 1943 four-fifths of Belgian children were displaying symptoms of rickets. In most countries city-dwellers suffered more from hunger than country people, because they had fewer opportunities for supplementing their diet by growing their own produce. The poor lacked cash to use the black market which, in all countries, continued to feed those with means to pay.
In the matter of diet Canada, Australia and New Zealand escaped lightly, and Americans scarcely suffered at all. Rationing was introduced to Roosevelt’s people only in 1943, and then on a generous scale. Gourmet magazine gushed tastelessly: ‘Imports of European delicacies may dwindle, but America has battalions of good food to rush to appetite’s defence.’ Meat was almost the only commodity in short supply, though Americans complained bitterly about that. A housewife named Catherine Renee Young wrote to her husband in May 1943: ‘I’m sick of the same thing … We hardly ever see good steak any more. And steak is the main meat that gives us strength. My Dad just came back from the store and all he could get was blood pudding and how I hate that.’ But whatever the shortcomings of wartime quality, in quantity American domestic meat consumption fell very little, even when huge shipments were exported to Britain and R
ussia.
Every nation with power to do so put its own people first, heedless of the consequences for others at their mercy. The Axis behaved most brutally, and with the direst consequences: Nazi policy in the east was explicitly directed towards starving subject races in order to feed Germans. Such was the regime’s administrative incompetence that food imports to the Reich, and consequent Soviet deaths, fell far short of the hopes of agriculture minister Herbert Backe and his ‘Hunger Plan’. People in occupied regions displayed extraordinary ingenuity in hiding crops from the occupiers, and clung tenaciously to life in defiance of the predictions of Nazi nutritionists, who anticipated thirty to forty million fatalities. But many people indeed perished. Pre-war Soviet agriculture was grossly inefficient, and much farmland had been overrun by the Wehrmacht. Even when it was reclaimed, machinery had been seized or destroyed, the countryside laid waste. In pursuit of the Wehrmacht’s policy of seeking to live off the land, German soldiers in the east consumed an estimated seven million tons of Russian grain, seventeen million cattle, twenty million pigs, twenty-seven million sheep and goats and over 100 million domestic fowls.
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