Their Promised Land

by Ian Buruma

  In fact, the letters suggest that Win was far more excited about Bernard’s promotion than he was. “My darling, august husband,” she writes on March 7, “we are all thrilled at the news, and I shall be terribly proud of my Brigadier, when we sally forth together one of these days—soon.” His reply, on March 20: “They just call it Brigadier, as far as I know—it’s a sort of bastard rank, which only happens during a war. The next rank above is Major General.”

  Perhaps his modesty was feigned. But I don’t think so. Being in the action, “having a crack” and all that, was what mattered to him far more than the pips on his uniform. Win took a slightly different view. Her cousin Ashley, now proudly serving in the British army too, had told her that Bernard would be entitled to wear his insignia as brigadier for sixty days after leaving India. “I must swank with my Brigadier, especially in the village,” she writes on June 19.

  —

  And then it was all over.

  “The great day has come,” Win writes on May 7. “What a pity that you can’t be here to celebrate the occasion with us.” Wendy, Roger, and Hans were allowed to go to London for twenty-four hours to see the floodlighting of all the city’s monuments that had survived the German bombs. They were there, in the Mall, in the midst of a delirious crowd facing Buckingham Palace, when the royal family and Churchill stepped onto the balcony. They cheered and sang and spent their pocket money on red, white, and blue favors and patriotic hats. They saw the three Lancaster bombers flying overhead dropping red and green flares and heard Churchill tell the nation to rejoice: “Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King!”

  Hilary wasn’t with them, since the idea of her getting lost in “an excited, drunken crowd—especially Yanks” made Win “terribly nervous.” Instead, on V-E night Hilary and Susan joined the local crowd on Inkpen Beacon to help light one of the bonfires that stretched all the way to the Scottish Highlands, while church bells rang through the night. On the evening before, Roger and Wendy had climbed on the roof of Mount Pleasant to strike the Union Jack, a large and imposing one that Win bought in Newbury for a large sum. Win writes, “I hope the Padels see it.”

  Of course, Win observes on May 10, it has been “a great deliverance, since that fateful May 10th, 1940, when all seemed lost. On that day, five years ago to-day, the man to whom we owe everything in this world, came into power . . . I have the greatest possible admiration for him & towards him I feel the deepest gratitude. I tremble lest he should now be supplanted in the pending General Election, he & all that he stands for.”

  “How marvellous it is to be British,” she writes on May 18, after hearing Churchill speak on the radio, “what a grand, humane country this is. How quiet and modest & temperate are our leading men, in moments of direst peril or of most glorious triumph.” Perhaps this was typical of the way many British people felt at the time, or these could have been the extravagant sentiments of the immigrants’ child. All the same, V-E Day came to Win as an anticlimax. She couldn’t bring herself to join the revelries: “I missed you too much to celebrate at all, and so I improved the shining hour by doing a bit of extra work in the garden.”

  One week later, Win goes up to Manchester to see John. They stay at the Midland Hotel, a grand Edwardian Baroque establishment, which Hitler had earmarked as the Nazi Party HQ in occupied Britain. Perhaps some of the seedy atmosphere of the war years got lodged in John’s memory and found a way into his film Yanks. The best scene in that movie is of the English wife, left behind on the home front, going off for what promises to be a weekend of sexual consummation with her friend, the lonely married American officer. They park in front of a large seaside hotel and see a young floozy emerge onto the balcony from one of the rooms to hang up her stockings on a line. Behind her hovers the shadow of a man in uniform. The shabbiness of it all prompts them to abandon their weekend escape.

  Win on May 14:

  [John] is an awfully nice boy—really Parsifalian* & easily shocked, for all his apparent sophistication. He and I danced at the hotel on Saturday night—the first time I have danced since 1941 (Ireland) . . . The Midland Hotel is wickedly expensive & full of Yanks & their tawdry bits. Our chambermaid said she was really grateful to us for occupying three of her bedrooms over this week-end, as she is so appalled by what she generally gets—especially in the best double rooms with bathroom attached! One American girl went to bed drunk on Saturday night & demanded whiskey in her room in lieu of breakfast the next morning.

  There is a prompt answer from Bernard on the twenty-ninth, which finally gets around to his promised thoughts about the Americans: “I can imagine the goings on of our Allies in the Midland Hotel. They are curious & without any subtlety or finesse (both wrong words, but you know what I mean) about women & only out for one thing & they are not very good at alcohol.”

  The announcement of V-E Day came to Bernard when he was “slumbering off under my net in the grounds” of the Agra Barracks. It must have been a curious night, with some of his fellow officers dancing around the mulberry bush—“my bed was the bush”—and sprinkling Bernard with drops of gin. Just as he was about to go to sleep again, he “received an S.O.S. in person” from an old patient “with a great psychological problem.” The details of this problem are not divulged, but it kept Bernard up for half the night.

  “My Beloved,” Bernard writes on May 8. “On this historic day I must send you a word of love.” He tells her not to fret “too much about world affairs & become too depressed. Anyway, you and I can’t set them in order, and perhaps now after this war people will finally work out their salvation.”

  In Bernard, the German defeat sparked a bittersweet train of memory and reflection, which was more in his character than pessimism about the future. He thanks Win for taking care of “our protégées.” “We can be pleased that in any case we have saved these twelve from the wreckage of Nazi clutches.” He thinks about the horrors of the last six years, and “how senseless it all was.” Now, he writes, “one can look back & remember what a near shave it all was & how in 1940/41 many of us wondered in our hearts really whether we should pull through, without letting on about this.” He uses a word that would take on a more specific meaning much later: “So my darling, the longest & greatest Chapter One of the world’s holocaust has ended.”

  About Chapter Two, the war in Asia, he is optimistic: “I don’t think the Japanese war will take very long to finish. If Russia declares war, I believe the Japs will realise the wisdom of throwing in the sponge, or is it a towel, very soon. So possibly John may be spared much.” The atomic bombs were still beyond imagination. But his prognosis was not wrong.

  Bernard worshipped Winston Churchill no less than Win did. But he had a keener sense than she did that Churchill represented the past, which had been sweet to them in many ways, but to which it would be foolish to try to cling. There would be a general election in July, against the wishes of Churchill, who had wanted a coalition government to continue until Japan was defeated. The idea of the war hero being voted out of office made Win tremble. Bernard’s feelings were more ambivalent. On May 27, he writes:

  I have mixed feelings about the election. England and the world still need the strong guiding hand of Churchill until the Jap is beaten & Europe settles into some sort of order. On the other hand, we must and can never slip back into our prewar ways, which nearly brought us to dissolution. The Conservatives have too many diehards, who correspond so closely to the old “ko hoi”* out here, and whose ideas are basically the same as in 1936–39. Moreover, if Labour got in there might be a better chance of good relations with Russia. On the other hand, Labour’s expressed views on Indian affairs are so curious and unenlightened that I begin to wonder if the rest of their policy can be sound. I am in a muddle & so will stick to Churchill and all he stands for—he continues to be the soundest rock.

  —

  Bernard and Win had been luckier than most European Jews,
lucky first of all that they were British, and thus stayed out of the Nazis’ reach. Bernard pointed this out to Win in moments of despair, in January 1944, for example. Win had written on December 12, 1943, how she longed for his return, and how “our eternal wish is always next year, and next year . . . I mourn every day that I grow older without you.” Bernard answers on January 1, 1944: “Dearest, I echo the same thoughts as you expressed in your last letter. I too feel that vital years for us are slipping by & now that I have nearly completed two years away, my restlessness is sometimes difficult to keep in bounds . . . If only I could see you for a month or so . . . But it just can’t be & then I tell myself that thousands are in a much more parlous state than we are, with hope and everything gone, their lives ruined, everything they have built up shattered.”

  He was right, of course, even though the number of close relatives who had perished was not as high as it might have been. Many had managed to get out of Germany in time. Some who failed to do so had been extraordinarily lucky. Hugo Natt and his wife, Clara, who had fled to London, had given up their son, Bernard, as lost, after he had been taken to a concentration camp in Belgium. Win writes on June 20 that a cable had just been received from him, saying, “Leaving Czechoslovakia for Holland.” He had presumably survived in Theresienstadt, a camp for relatively privileged prisoners, many of whom were later transported to Auschwitz, if they had managed to withstand starvation, illness, and abuse. However, Win continues, there was “no word of the Schusters. I am afraid they are all lost.”

  They were indeed all murdered, after they had been picked up by the Nazis in Holland, one by one, leaving in an extra twist of cruelty the severely handicapped Martin till last.

  In the case of some Jewish families, the collective experience of Nazi persecution and murder had created a stronger sense of common identity. While it is true that the Jewish catastrophe was often talked about at family gatherings, Win’s feelings were as ambivalent as they always had been. This was not really a question of suppression or denial. What it meant was that she remained true to her background and class.

  Here she is, on March 9, 1945, meeting Vera Baer for lunch in London. Vera was one of the hostel children, the one whose photograph Win had admired because there wasn’t “a trace of 45.” Win declares that she is “quite a pleasant looking girl, rather short and thickset, but still quite fair. While we were at lunch, her mother suddenly turned up—quite unbidden—but with the typical cheek of her race and type . . . She looked a typical East Ender, dark & sallow, with a bright handkerchief tied round her head & carrying a large basket full of ‘Delikatessen.’ She is cook to some people called Taylor (née Schneidermacher). Vera talks perfect English & carries a definite veneer of a good boarding school education.”

  Like Hans Levy, Vera had made a successful transformation in Win’s eyes. Hans had even taken an interest in cricket. “By Jove,” Win writes on June 23, “how he had profited by living in England in a wholly English community.”

  Another one of the protégées, Marianne Mamlok, had decided to go a step further and become a Christian. This was a tricky issue among children of the Kindertransport. Some had been taken in by Christian families, who then tried to convert them. Some had taken this step themselves. Marianne had evidently wanted to convert, and Win had swiftly given her consent. The child had lost both her parents, and Win felt it would do her good to join a religious community of her choice. However, no sooner had she done this than “an indignant letter” was received “from one—Rabbi Levine,” who had threatened to ensure that the child would no longer get any support from the Jewish refugee organization, Bloomsbury House, if she went through with it. Win writes on July 2, “Everyone is agreed that it is a deplorable letter & will go far to increase anti-Semitism—& with justice.”

  Bernard answers on the eleventh: “I am sorry about the Marianne bother. How narrow-minded people are. What the hell does it matter, provided you do your stuff & the conversion from one to another has been carefully thought-over & is not just a flash in the pan. Of course, we’ll see her along.”

  This reaction was typically generous. Neither Bernard nor Win felt that conversion was a betrayal of the tribe; Win was certainly more tolerant of this move than she was of German accents or “typically East End” behavior. But things are always a little different when one’s own children are involved. Hilary had always been searching for spiritual solace of one kind or another, unlike her brothers and sisters, who had never shown any interest in religious faith. When I grew up, Wendy was happy to talk about many aspects of being “45,” but never about the religion itself, about which she was wholly ignorant. But Hilary was a seeker from the beginning.

  In June 1945, while still at Badminton School, Hilary had written to Win about her religious feelings and her desire to become a Christian. Win’s reaction was deeply skeptical, as though Marianne Mamlok had been forgotten. She writes to Bernard, on June 5, “I have told her that it would require years of mature thought and study of the subject before she could be entitled to take such a step, and that now there are more opportunities in the holidays for attending services at the LJS [Liberal Jewish Synagogue], she should give that a chance.”

  Bernard answers on June 13: “I think your first reaction to Hilary’s religious wonderings was correct. She must think it well over but I should be the last to stand in the way of a conversion through true conviction. At present I think she is too young for a final decision.”

  She was in fact no younger than Marianne Mamlok. But her conviction must have been firm, for after a long peregrination via a Presbyterian in Switzerland and various evangelists in South America, she ended up in the Catholic Church as a member of the Opus Dei. Marianne not only became a Christian, as she had wished, but lost her way in a disastrous marriage with a German former Nazi.

  Even though I must confess to having a slight prejudice against conversions, I don’t mean to cite these examples as a warning against them. But then I don’t have any faith to convert from. Perhaps Hilary and Marianne did not either. With all their doubts and contradictions, Bernard and Win hung on to what they always were, liberal Jews whose national loyalties were never allowed to conflict with what was left of their tribal, or ethnic, or official religious identification. As is clear from Bernard’s letters, he was happy to find spiritual comfort wherever he could. And both found the deepest expression of their feelings in music. But what they clung to more than ever as the war was nearing its end was their English idyll, expressed in her passion for gardening, his dreaming over Country Life, her faith in English boarding schools, his in fresh air and exercise, and their celebration of the Berkshire countryside. That, perhaps, was their truest “religion.”

  While waiting for Bernard finally to be released from the army, Win kept returning to their idyll in her last letters of the war. This is how she ended her letter on June 23: “Goodnight my beloved. It is a glorious sunny evening, & Berkshire & our particular garden are looking lovely, I wish we could walk down hand-in-hand to shut up the news & admire the view on the way, & rejoice in each other’s proximity.”

  Of course, they never could shut up the news, and Bernard did not give up his medical ambitions in London, and they didn’t run a farm together, as Win had wished in one of her last letters, and Bernard continued to demonstrate his patriotism by volunteering for army duty every time there was a crisis, well beyond the age that his services were required. But the idyll lived on, as their mutual dream of a safe haven.

  Win desperately hoped that Bernard could be home by July 21, to hear my mother, Wendy, and her sister Hilary sing in their school production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, the comic opera about the love of a captain’s daughter and a common sailor that makes fun of the absurdities of excessive patriotism.

  I have in my hand a telegram stamped by the Newbury post office on July 13, 1945. It is addressed to “Schlesinger—Mount Pleasant Kintbury.” It reads: “Flyin
g home. Should make the meeting twenty first. So Thrilled. Bun Schlesinger.”

  EPITAPH

  Bernard and Win are buried in Willesden, in Northwest London. The United Synagogue Cemetery is divided by a wall of plain sandy-colored brick, of the kind that was used in many late Victorian terraced houses. On one side of the wall are the graves of Orthodox Jews, including Bernard’s parents. Liberal Jews are buried on the other side. The two sides are invisible to each other.

  It is not easy to find their graves if you don’t know where to look. They are not marked by slabs of marble or ostentatious tombs. All there is, half hidden under a small bed of roses, near a sculpture of a weeping woman and the wall that divides the Orthodox from the Liberals, is a small white tablet with the names and dates of Bernard E. Schlesinger, Winifred H. Schlesinger, and John R. Schlesinger.

  None of them had an easy ending. Bernard was the first to go, in 1984. His mind had begun to wander some years before. Win could no longer talk to him in the way she had for almost seventy years, about politics, the news, the family, friends, music. I was living in Hong Kong at the time. Even in his diminished mental state, Bernard still kept up his habit of writing letters. In his last letter to me, he confused me with my cousin Paul. But to the very end of his life, he never forgot to thank Win for being his wife.