What You Did Not Tell

by Mark Mazower

  And then one day in June 1941 he came in from making haystacks in the fields on what was an unseasonably cold and cloudy summer’s afternoon and heard the radio announce the news that he, at the age of sixteen, instantly understood changed everything: “Sunday, June 22: Germany attacks Russia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The entry in his diary is marked with a force even greater than that he used three years later in a very different spirit, when news came in of the liberation of Paris. For now events were unremitting in their grimness, and while he worked for his exams, he monitored the front as it overran places that for him were much more than just names on a map—“Grodno in danger,” and then, revising his Virgil, on June 30: “Jolly hot! Germans attacking Minsk.” On July 17: “Picked whortleberries in morning. 1 and ½ lbs. Got 6d cash from Mrs. N. No letter at post office from parents. Got most of my marks. Smolensk threatened.”

  If, like a lot of the boys, he was homesick, his desire to see his family must have been intensified by the dismaying news from the east, and his relief when he gets home leaps off the page. April 10, 1941: “Caught 9.30 train. Changed at Taunton. London at 2. Home 3.30,” as though recording the train schedule itself assured a kind of normality, and indeed he always remembered the trains and how well they were running through the war. He goes straight into the garden to mow the lawn, happily active amid the daily alerts, the sirens, the sound of anti-aircraft battery, and evenings spent behind the blackout curtains. The bombs had stopped raining down on the city so furiously. He planted onions, carrots, and tomatoes and built a hutch for rabbits and chickens behind the house on Oakeshott Avenue. When he was not in London, he worried about his parents, neither of whom could easily have coped physically with a serious emergency, and as often as not, news from home left him feeling down. His mother wrote on his birthday in June encouraging him to share the sweets she had sent with his classmates and reporting on their new life: the rationing, the friends moving away to safer suburbs farther out, André passing through in his new officer’s uniform, and the detailed bulletins from the garden that she knew would bring him some comfort: “Potatoes on the upper bed, lovely, no sign of them below, no beans, carrots very poorly coming up. Peas are splendid. Tomato plants were caught by frost and turned yellowish.” It was not just the garden that he missed. It was trips to the Forum in Kentish Town to see films with his parents, their walks around Kenwood, the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street. In new lodgings across from the Newmans in 1942, he tried to re-create something of his home life, helping his landlady, Mrs. James, by tending her back garden, but for once it did not work. That spring he was beset by real anxiety, and for the first and only time in half a century’s worth of diaries, he jotted down a dream.

  8 May 1942

  Lecture on India. The first dull day for a long time. Had a curious dream last night. I was being sent on a bus to some hospital with Oppé and crowds of other boys. I wanted to get away but was forced to shake hands with a reception committee. Then I escaped and hid in a gun’n fish shop. Air pistols 11 and 4 shillings. Then I woke up.

  With the Third Reich extending its control over the Soviet Union, this was a sinister vision in difficult times. He must have been in some kind of nervous state because his mother phoned him from London a few days later, a rare enough occurrence. Then, even more unusually, she came up to visit him and to see the headmaster, and the next day he decided to go back with her to London where he spent nearly a week before returning for his exams.

  Maybe it was just homesickness, but he was also probably feeling under pressure because he had decided to apply to university. Max had come round to the idea—at first he had muttered Dad should train as a builder’s apprentice, prompting an explosive reaction from Frouma—and after his parents encouraged him to think about history, sensing his liking for the subject, he did well enough in his examinations to make this a possibility. That summer Max sent him an affectionate letter, hoping to get him home to coincide with his own leave in August, and giving him encouragement. “Dear Billy,” he wrote. “Come home as soon as you can … You will find the house overrun by chickens and Russians. I am afraid you will run back to Minehead!” And then, enigmatically: “I am glad you took a decision, and doubts do not trouble your mind anymore.” What doubts were these? They may have been the usual ones raised by leaving school and deciding where and what to do next. But they must have been unusually intense for Max to have commented. He had signed off: “Cheerio! Spirits up and ‘cares’ down! With love, Dad.” The stoical life-hardened Bundist had acquired a British stiff upper lip and for just once we catch a glimpse of that resolute approach to putting difficult things behind one that was perhaps Max’s most emphatic message to his son.

  That Dad’s anxieties were prompted solely by loneliness, or by the challenge of getting into Oxford, I doubt. He was worried, and with good reason, about the fate of his relatives in France and Eastern Europe. In Poland and Russia, we now know, the fate of his uncles and their families was to be grim beyond any imagining. But Beauchamp was just across the Channel and the Germans were there too, and no word had come from his uncle and aunt for more than a year.

  On Oakeshott Avenue, where Frouma was sick with worry, all they knew was that Niura and Yasha had returned to Beauchamp in the summer of 1940 once the Germans had taken over, but Vitalie had remained with his wife and little girl in Lyon, in what became the unoccupied zone. From there some intermittent correspondence with those abroad was still possible. In March 1941 Dad wrote to his uncle from Minehead and on May 9, a month and a half before the invasion of the USSR, a telegram arrived at Oakeshott Avenue with the news that they were all well. Two days later, a postcard arrived for him with more details: “After the war,” Vitalie wrote—evidently he assumed the Germans had won and were destined to rule Europe for many years—he had regained his job as an electrical engineer. He added, without going into details, that Niura was living in difficult circumstances (“dans une ambiance loin d’être agréable”). His wife, Alice, added a few equally enigmatic words: They were far from their Paris friends, living in a tiny apartment with nothing to recommend it, but they were nevertheless grateful to be where they were.

  About a year later, on July 18, 1942, another telegram got through. This time the resourceful Vitalie reported that Niura and Yasha were in good health: He was working, and she was with him—an innocuous few words to allay an unspoken fear.

  The war was more than twenty years in the past when I first got to know my great-aunt Niura in Beauchamp and I am struck now that it never occurred to me to raise the subject of how she had survived the occupation. I don’t remember feeling it was taboo. But much later, after her death, Dad told me she had not liked to talk about that time, so perhaps I had felt some subliminal deterrence or the subject had been avoided without my noticing it. One thing Dad had gleaned after the war was that Yasha had expected Niura to go out and do the shopping early on even after she had pinned the yellow star on her overcoat. And there were certainly some bitter and unpleasant local memories because when Patrick, her nephew, stayed with her after the war, she used to point out the collaborators to make sure that he did not play with their children on the swings in the park. Between early 1941 and the summer of 1942 there had been a barrage of legislation against Jews, and they were obliged to wear a yellow star and to register at their local police station. Stateless Jews such as Niura were especially vulnerable to blackmail and worse. In the Beauchamp region an increase in anti-Semitism was reported by the local prefect from the very beginning of the occupation, and “adventurers” and “gangsters of the press” were said to be stepping up their activities. In the spring of 1942, the first transports for Auschwitz left from the Paris suburbs carrying large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews. There was one on March 27, four in June, and then a stream of transports starting on July 17. Vitalie’s telegram had arrived from Lyon at the moment of maximal danger; perhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps not.

  After the war the family in London learned what
had happened and how our relatives in France had survived. For one thing, Yasha was not Jewish and so Niura’s married name—Stepanof—helped hide her background. With his drinking and womanizing, they had not had an easy relationship before the war, and Niura had often been depressed and ill, but it turned out to have been helpful to be with him. Not only had he an attested pedigree as a long-standing anticommunist who had fought for the Whites against the Bolsheviks; he was also a highly prized draftsman working for one of France’s main builders of railway rolling stock, a protected industry vital to the German war effort. Niura had begun wearing the star when the first decree was promulgated. But when Vitalie heard, he telephoned her and insisted that she take it off and not report to the police. Niura listened to her older brother—Yasha does not seem to have intervened either way—and the result was that she remained in their home through the war undisturbed.

  Vitalie—seated on the left with his unit in an anti-aircraft battery on the eve of the German invasion—was more vulnerable both because he was male and because he had to travel widely for his work, including into the occupied zone. But although his Jewish background put him in acute danger, his too was a marriage that provided some protection. Alice came from a Catholic milieu, which had not prevented her being warmly enfolded into the embrace of the Toumarkines: At their wedding there had been telegrams of welcome and congratulations from Moscow and London and there were frequent invitations to visit both cities. Alice’s mother was a conventional bourgeoise in her views and somewhat anti-Semitic, but her father was a very different spirit: an architect and a painter, an open-minded and artistic man, who liked his son-in-law. He had been wounded in the First World War, and had gone on to design the family home, a cubist villa that stood out in their leafy bourgeois Paris suburb. Even before the war they had agreed—and Frouma too had given the idea her blessing—to bring their little girl up as a Catholic, partly in order to please Alice’s mother, and baby Monique was baptized in 1940.1 Once the Germans took over, a friendly priest supplied them with fake baptismal papers. They kept up the pretense for years and their son, Patrick, who was born in 1944, was baptized and confirmed in Notre-Dame des Champs in Montparnasse, and seems only to have realized that his father was Jewish when he was sixteen.

  Vitalie was once caught on the street in a roundup by Lithuanian militiamen working for the Germans in Lyon. Fortunately they failed to identify him as Jewish and he was released after two days. That was his closest brush with deportation. Protected by his employer, he continued working for his engineering firm, and since one of his jobs was to maintain refrigerated units for markets and shops, he had access to a ready supply of vegetables and kept his wife’s parents, hungry in their Vesinet villa, supplied with potatoes. After the Germans took over the whole of the country, he moved Alice and Monique down to what they imagined would be the safety of the Vercors plateau, only to find that in the final months they were caught in the midst of bitter fighting between German troops and the Resistance. Many Jews were being hidden in the mountains by farmers, and when Vitalie went back after the war to thank the cowherd who had lodged them, he decided to reveal that he was Jewish. “But of course,” she told him. “We all knew that.” Frouma’s brother and sister had passed through the war unscathed, principally because others around them had either looked after them or had, at the least, not informed on them. They had been very lucky.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Oxford and What Came Between

  Immigrants cluster together and in this way they shape each other’s lives. The Koldofskys and the Zukermans, the Kidels, the Broidos, the Japolskys: These were some of the names the social life of 20 Oakeshott Avenue revolved around, newcomers on the North London heights, doling out biscuits and sweets and Russian endearments in their curtained living rooms. Among them was the Riga-born businessman Solomon Bielinky, a figure of means, a successful coal trader in whom Max confided, and a fiver from Bielinky arrived in an envelope for Dad on his birthday every year until he was about twenty. Bielinky’s son, a few years older than Dad and intimidatingly self-assured, had gone up to Balliol in 1940 from University College School, Dad’s old school. An equally self-confident nephew had trod the same path the year before him. In both cases, it was obvious that their studies would be truncated since eighteen was the call-up age, but Bielinky’s advice for them and for Max, when he came asking about his son, was to get your foot in the door at Oxford as soon as possible.

  In this way not only Oxford but Balliol in particular became the aspiration, the college of H. H. Asquith’s men of “effortless superiority,” the powerhouse of the British political elite in the mid-twentieth century, and, not least as a result of the deliberate policy then pursued by the college’s socialistic master, A. R. Lindsay, a funnel for the bright upwardly mobile sons of the middle classes. Balliol was their portal to an English life that Lindsay hoped they would modernize and invigorate. The son, Louis Bielinky, would be awarded the Military Cross in the invasion of Italy with the Royal Irish Fusiliers in 1944 and became a high-flying Treasury official before dying tragically young in 1953. The nephew, David Ginsburg, became a long-serving Labour MP. Where they trod, Dad followed.

  On a chilly damp night in the autumn of 1942 he saw Oxford for the first time. He was young and it did not seem welcoming. In the blackout, Balliol’s impassive Gothic façade must have loomed even more cheerlessly as he came up Broad Street from the station than it would thirty-odd years later when I went up and entered the college gate to take the entrance exam in my turn. But the rain pattering down on the old flagstones would have sounded the same, and the impossibly narrow twisting staircases leading to unheated rooms probably induced a similar sense of anomie. A question from this charged occasion stuck in his memory: Dad was asked which era he would most like to have been born into. The second half of the eighteenth century, he told them. At the interview, he was questioned about this answer, which he always remembered and which testified to his rationalism, the value he attached to calm and civility, a capacity to find humor in life, and perhaps too his suspicion of unregulated passion. Dinner was served at a long candlelit table lined with young men eyeing each other suspiciously over the dishes, the college servants hovering, and a disorienting sense of competitiveness.

  He stood at the threshold of a different England from any he knew. Oxford was a laboratory of the mandarinate, sharp minds half hidden behind cultivated manners, a little aloof but with urgency in the questioning, in the hands of a generation of men who had already known more than their share of war’s pain and could measure the seriousness of the times and the temper of the young men knocking at their oak doors. Maurice Roy Ridley, the college chaplain, was a Keats scholar. In 1913, the young, handsome Ridley had won the Newdigate Prize for his poem “Oxford.” As he read it aloud at the Encaenia ceremony, he had made such an impression on the young Dorothy L. Sayers that she later turned him into the hero of the detective stories that made her famous and immortalized him as Lord Peter Wimsey. This man Ridley was one of the two Balliol fellows who interviewed Dad.

  The other was a powerhouse. Benedict Humphrey Sumner taught Russian history, indeed he was one of the pioneers of that subject in England, despite having visited the country only once. And he was, though largely forgotten today, a historian of genius. He was tall, wiry, pipe in mouth, a physically imposing man of reserve but great charm and energy who would die still relatively young as the warden of All Souls in 1951, worn out by overwork. He had fought on the western front before being invalided out; subsequent intelligence work led to the Paris Peace Conference and several years with the International Labour Organization. With interests that extended across Europe, from the Ottoman Empire to the latest trends in Soviet scholarship, Sumner was anything but parochial. At the time Dad encountered him, he was not merely tutoring in history but working for the government as well, analyzing conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe at a Foreign Office think tank that had been parked in Balliol for the duration of the war. A
s if that was not enough, he was also writing the brief survey on Russian history that he published the following year, a book far ahead of its time in arguing for the existence of fundamental continuities between the Soviet regime and its predecessors. Dad, who was to develop affection and deep respect for Sumner and his book-lined rooms, must have made a good impression on these two remarkable men because they told him he had a place and could begin in the New Year.

  Only seventeen, he was at Oxford. He had finished school a year early, and so he began his undergraduate career at the start of 1943, choosing history and Russian, probably the only Russianist of his year, certainly the only one at Balliol.

  It was wartime, a time of rationing and improvisation. There were still the watchful porters, the gates locked at night to keep women out and the men in. But there were relatively few students and some of the college buildings had been put to other uses: In the Garden Quad, Arnold Toynbee, along with Sumner and others, was helping to lay the foundations of the postwar Anglo-American alliance, though a stripling like Dad would not have known it. Air raids were the pressing fear, and the possibility of a conflagration that would consume the library, and there were hair-raising drills across the rooftops. Students came and went, as they were called up, entering an army that had not recovered from the shock of Dunkirk. Most of those who were there were a year or two older than Dad, and many had already started the previous autumn when he was still finishing up at Minehead. With the call-up on everyone’s mind, the times did not conduce to lasting friendships and Dad did not make any. Ernest Gellner, later one of the country’s leading sociologists, entered the college that year. Yet despite both of them living on the Holly Lodge Estate—the Gellners’ house was scarcely one hundred yards from the Mazowers’ and the families knew each other slightly—he and Dad did not mix. Another Jewish refugee was John Hajnal, a quiet man, shy, politely spoken, and brilliant, who had also gone to UCS and came up to Balliol when he was even younger than Dad; he became an eminent demographer, one of those remarkable scholars who achieves lasting renown with one classic article, and was the only member of the college intake of that year whom Dad kept up with in later life, perhaps because by coincidence he settled at the end of our road to raise his family. In general those men Dad was drawn to tended not to be intellectuals nor to achieve fame afterwards.