No Fixed Abode: A Jewish Odyssey to Africa

NO FIXED ABODE

Previous Publications Author of Wayaleshi (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1959) Translator from German and editor of The Memoirs of B. L. Monasch of Krotoschin (Leo Boeck Institute, 1979)

NO FIXED ABODE A Jewish Odyssey to Africa

Peter Fraenkel

Published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU In the United States and in Canada distributed by St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

Copyright © Peter Fraenkel, 2005

The right of Peter Fraenkel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 1–85043–626–6 EAN 978–1–85043–626–3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog card: available

Typeset in Berkeley Oldstyle by Oxford Publishing Services, Oxford Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin

Contents List of illustrations

vi

Part I: Silesia

1

1. 2. 3. 4.

Roots in the air But we were Germans We became Jews Exodus

3 15 39 76

Part II: Rhodesia 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

101

Where you die of hunger doesn’t make much of a difference, does it? Encountering Dimitrov and Macbeth Quit you like men Red thug? Becoming a bwana Out of the saucepan Vultures high and low Vampire men Searchlights in the dark The watch on the Rhine

Index

103 130 142 157 163 176 200 217 235 238 241

v

List of illustrations 1. My cap said ‘Deutschland’ but big grandfather and my mother kept from me what was happening in the fatherland on my first day of school. 2. God did not accept my bargain. ‘Little grandfather’ died three days after this photo was taken. 3. Celebrating Sergeant Fraenkel’s military prowess? Unlikely. Probably he had secured a chicken dinner for his gun crew. 4. ‘A gypsy?’ asked the Nazi youth leader. It was Teddy’s portrait of my mother. 5. The ‘Saucepan Special’ people’s radio. 6. Michael Kittermaster interviewing a Lozi aristocrat at the ‘Smoke that Thunders’ 7. Escape from the office: recording by the shores of Lake Malawi. 8. Obscure constitutional shenanigans clarified. Guardian cartoonist Low on a high! 9. Alick Nkhate with his quartet. Rocket guns silenced his song.

vi

16 44 57 85 178 182 226 228 229

PART I

Silesia

Chapter 1

Roots in the air October 1971 ‘And somewhere around here was a whipping post … way back in the Middle Ages. There’s a plaque among the flagstones. I can’t see it now. It’s getting too dark.’ ‘No, madam, not here; it was over there, nearer the wall.’ Yes. I have been here before, not in the Middle Ages, not quite. But I am one of those who can remember the days when the Staupsäule was still standing there just in front of the medieval city hall. There were heavy rusty rings on it, and we once tried to tie one of our school friends to it. The façades of the square look better now, more convincingly Gothic and Renaissance. The statues have changed though. There was a man on horseback over there – some king or general of Prussia – where that scholarly gentleman is now enthroned. ‘We brought him from Lvov,’ my escort explained. Yes, I have been here before. The bookshop we pass on the way to the theatre was a bookshop even then. Strange, after all those years: a bookshop and a lending library. From its shelves (could they be the same shelves still?) rode Winnetou, chief of the Apaches, on his coalblack steed. And close behind him, bareback, Indian-style, rode I, performing deeds of valour that were the amazement of all the tribe. And when he met his tragic death, it was I who mounted his steed and rallied the braves against the onslaught of the palefaces. Tonight I cannot even decipher the titles of the books. Yes, I have been here before. This second square seemed larger then, much larger. Tauentzien was buried in the middle, where the tram is running now. Tauentzien? Why he defended this city in some epic siege. You have never read his famous words of defiance? No, I suppose not. And has the palace been restored? Oh, yes, I assure you: a palace – just beyond the boulevard and the moat: stucco and gold and elegant chamber music by candlelight. There’s nothing left of it, then? We pass through darkened streets. There is a power cut. The area becomes unfamiliar and I lose my sense of direction. Eventually we reach the 3

SILESIA theatre, bright with chandeliers and with an audience quick-witted and spontaneous. I do not understand the dialogue and my guide translates fragments laboriously. Nevertheless, the evening is exhilarating. Perhaps it wasn’t the clever play, or the lively, youthful audience, but the homecoming – the excitement of recognition. Or is it a baser satisfaction? I have survived. I have survived, you bastards. I am alive and back. And all those big battalions have gone. Just where are we? Where is this theatre? I try to retrace our walk through darkened streets as my attention wanders from the play. Somewhere around here, my father’s office must have been. It must have been in one of these streets that we met Stolzenberg, his longtime friend and colleague, a short while after my father had been dismissed. They had occupied neighbouring offices for years, had consulted each other on difficult cases, played skittles together and tennis, and their wives met for coffee. But that day Stolzenberg had seen my father from afar and crossed furtively to the other side of the street. I well remember my father’s face. Did Stolzenberg perish among the ruins of this city? Or could he be alive still, somewhere west, an old man repeating toothlessly: ‘I myself was never a Nazi. Why some of my best friends…’ My escort dropped me at my hotel after the theatre – a bright and amusing woman, like all the Poles I had met that evening. But I was glad to be alone. In the gleaming new hotel by a dark square carved from the ruins I ate and drank warming, heavy Hungarian wine. I have survived. I am back in this foreign city where I cannot even read the titles of books. Yet I was born here. I spent my childhood somewhere out there in the dark. To go to bed seemed impossible. I walked, wrapped up in a winter coat and fur hat. I wandered through cold, dimly lit streets. My escort had been wrong: in the moonlight I found a fragment of the palace that Frederick the Great had built – the arches of an orangery, I think. Few would have known what they had been – only historians or archaeologists, or survivors from a sunken past. This lady who guided me is only a few years younger than I. She has spent most of her life in this city. She loves Wroclaw – its churches, its islands. But she has never even heard that Frederick the Great built a palace here. She doesn’t know that he exercised his tall bodyguards in the square. Her school never taught her Tauentzien’s proud, defiant words when asked to surrender: ‘I have been entrusted by my sovereign with the duty of defending this city. You, sire, would not desire for your opponent a man so craven as to betray such a trust.’ 4

ROOTS IN THE AIR Beyond the moat are the law courts: the marble entrance hall has been patched with whitewashed plaster. There are bullet scars on the façade. Here storm troopers, led by one of the court messengers, bawled ‘Juden raus’ (out with the Jews) and roughed up Jewish lawyers – my uncle among them. Just behind there was once a synagogue: red brick, mock Byzantine, an ugly building now that I think back on it. But in my childhood it was to me a great dome of light with golden candelabras: a place of protection in a hostile world. I would go there with my grandfather, my hand in his enormous hand – my ‘big grandfather’ – a broad-shouldered giant, so tall and straight in his youth that they had made him serve in the Imperial Guards. The silver-bedecked scrolls and bells tinkled as they were carried in procession. Song went up to the high dome. A shudder would go through me as they intoned the prayer for the dead. I turned the corner. But I knew I would not find the building, for I had, myself, seen it burn that morning after the Kristallnacht. We stood at this very corner, my father and I, that November morning in 1938. He had shown unusual decisiveness. When he heard that they were rounding up Jewish men in their homes, he had declared that he would go and mingle with the crowds. My mother had argued: ‘At least take the child with you. Then I’ll get to hear if they arrest you.’ And that was how we came to be wandering around the city centre that day. We passed a smashed-up bottle store with a storm trooper on guard and a drunken woman doing a jig on the pavement, crowing: ‘Serves them right, the Saujuden, serves them right, Jew pigs.’ The onlookers seemed embarrassed. But here, at this very corner, we stood in front of the burning synagogue, amid a large, silent crowd. The newspapers lied about the anti-Semitic fury of the population. The crowd stood silently and I overheard one older man in overalls say quietly: ‘Now was that necessary?’ I still have the childish diary I kept then. ‘The most dreadful sight of my life: the view of the collapsed cupola … there where the snapped Star of David has penetrated: a deep hole in the metal of the dome, but deep, far deeper still, in my heart. … This will be avenged, as certain as there is a God in heaven.’ I reread it before coming to Breslau and found a curious spelling error. The German for avenged is ‘gerächt’ from Rache, revenge. But I spelt it ‘gerecht’ as if derived from ‘Recht’ – justice. Perhaps even then I felt more comfortable with the hope for justice than with the desire for revenge. A prefab hut covers the site today. One or two people hasten past – remembering nothing. I walk on into the cold autumn night. Beyond that railway overpass 5

SILESIA the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse starts, or used to. There were fine patrician residences here once, with classical porticoes … opulent houses with wide balconies. And now? A wasteland, one vast cleared empty building lot, waiting for some great town planning scheme, still waiting nearly 30 years after the destruction of Breslau. The empty expanse is cut in two by a tree-lined avenue, with tramlines among the trees. At various points tarred motor roads without pavements cross it. These roads had pavements once, and houses, and names – names that come back to me as I traverse the waste ground: Sadowastrasse, Schillerstrasse, Opitzstrasse. There is only one sign of habitation in the darkness and I walk towards it. It is a caravan for building workers. They seem to be laying cables. Through the steamed-up window I see a lone man brewing tea. Corner Sadowastrasse: that’s how far we used to walk with my grandfather, my other, ‘little grandfather’. He had been ill. He had had a stroke and my mother and I would take him for a daily walk. On our return we would see him across this street – a tarred path in the wasteland now. He would walk the rest of the way home by himself, but not without first performing a daily ritual. Every day at this very spot he would take off his hat and bow to me. And I, on the other side of the road – six years old – would take off my cap and bow to him. Then he would shuffle a few steps further, turn again, and with great ceremony take off his hat once again, and bow. And I would do the same – four or five times, every day. I stop now, amid all this emptiness, and sheepishly take off my fur hat, and bow. A tram clatters through the wasteland. I hope no one has seen. At the edges of this dark field rise great blocks of flats – elevenstorey prefabricated buildings, cold and concrete, like the sheer cliffs of the moon. Lights are starting to go out in the buildings. A tram stops in the tree-lined avenue and I notice a gap in the trees. There was something … if only I could dredge it from my memory. Yes! There was once a newspaper kiosk just here. Strange, how trees survive and renew themselves … how even gaps in the trees remain, but not one brick of the kiosk. That kiosk – I stood pressed against it by a great crowd. I can date that memory: late January 1933 or early February. I find myself talking to myself, and I am speaking German, which I do very rarely: ‘Tag der Machtergreifung, the day of the seizure of power. That must have been when it was, or a few days later.’ I stood here amid the crowd, holding onto my father. Police stood all around us, heavily armed. I had never seen such weapons before – machine pistols with thick, perforated barrels. They had been 6

ROOTS IN THE AIR called out to protect the victory march of the triumphant Nazis. It was certainly 1933. At subsequent anniversaries they no longer needed armed protection. The Brown Shirts marched – swastika armlets and chinstraps over jowls. ‘Vati, why do some attachments wear black trousers and some brown?’ My father did not know, or care. They carried brass-tipped standards with swastika flags and tassels. ‘Die Fahne hoch’ – raise high the flag. Clear the streets for the brown battalions.’ Among the crowd lining the street there was a protester – one solitary brave man. The men with chinstraps broke rank and made towards him. The crowd gave way. They grabbed him by his tie and beat him with clenched fists. His nose was bleeding. Then one of the standard-bearers rushed at him with his brass-tipped flag and plunged it into his chest. But did I really see it? Or was I only told about it afterwards? It seems unbelievable now. Certainly I remember my father repeating uncomprehendingly: ‘and the police just stood by. The police just stood by. After all – this isn’t the wilds of Africa.’ Fate would have it that he was to spend most of the rest of his life in central Africa and to live through a people’s struggle for independence. My own work, in those later days, took me into the midst of shouting crowds, protest marches and riotous assemblies, but neither my father nor I ever saw such savagery again. That day, in 1933, when the swastika flags were carried past, the onlookers meekly raised their hands in the Nazi salute. And with a hangdog look, so did my father. Every now and then the marching columns would interrupt their raucous singing and chant in unison: ‘Deutschland erwache’, Germany awake, and ‘Juda verrecke’, perish (or better croak) Jewry! All has gone, from this Polish city. Only I have survived. I am alive and breathing and my breath condenses in the cold autumn night. In those great cliffs of apartment houses in the distance they now speak Polish. Or if their mother tongue is German, they disguise it. No one now speaks, or sings or bawls in German. They fought bitterly over these streets. Even after Hitler’s death, several days after the fall of Berlin, they still defended ‘Fortress Breslau’ – madness with grandeur, faithful beyond death. Hence the desolation! Beyond what was once the Kaiser-Wilhelmplatz I find myself among familiar buildings, apartment houses on a more homely, human scale. That darkened works canteen was an elegant café in my childhood. In the garden behind it were chestnut trees where we 7

SILESIA gathered conkers. I quicken my pace. If the next street survives, the entry will be through an arch. Will it? Yes. It is there, just as I remember it. Behind this archway my cousin and I used to hide and waylay the ‘Sioux’. Around another corner was my grandfather’s flat – the tall guardsman who took me to synagogue. By the light of a single streetlamp I see: the building is there, unchanged. Behind that first-floor window stood my grandmother’s grand piano, in a room full of ruffled curtains and Persian carpets and small oval-framed photographs. I push open the door of the apartment house. I look around the entrance hall by the light of a bare bulb: some of the plaster has fallen off, exposing red brick. A voice calls from the open door of the ground floor flat, but I do not understand. Fascinated, I walk towards the door that leads towards the garden. It’s familiar: this was once an ornate art nouveau design of glass and curved wood. Rough boards have replaced the glass. I try to push the door open, but it appears to be locked. One small square glass pane remains and I try to look through into the courtyard and garden. I am looking for … the cherry tree. In the moonlight I can make out a frame for beating carpets. I press closer to the pane. The voice calls again from the concierge’s flat. No, I cannot see. What a glorious tree it was: I would climb it and sit among the blossoms or among the fruit. I would sit within a few feet of my grandparents’ balcony – a large, roofed open-air room where the family gathered for coffee and cake. Perhaps I had got bored or frightened by the grown-up talk, mainly of emigration: ‘Peru? Northern Rhodesia? Shanghai?’ ‘But why? Surely it can’t get any worse here, can it?’ So I would escape up this tree, within earshot of the grown-ups, yet in a private world. I would place twin cherries over my ears, like earrings. And now I hear padded footsteps and a thickset woman in slippers comes out of the downstairs flat. She addresses me in querulous Polish. I shrug my shoulders. She raises her voice, irritated. ‘I am looking for the cherry tree,’ I reply carefully in English, not expecting to be understood, or wanting to be. Then I murmur an apology and retreat into the cold night. I still do not know about the cherry tree. The moon is up and it is bitterly cold. The warmth of the dinner and the red wine has long worn off, and yet I cannot go back to my hotel. I walk in the direction of my parents’ home. On the right lived a little girl I wanted to marry when I was seven, on the left old Mrs Wendriner with her collection of musical boxes. I cross an avenue of 8

ROOTS IN THE AIR fine trees, exactly as I remember it. I am amazed at this capacity of trees to survive and recover. I step over twisted railings that once framed neat Germanic strips of lawn. I stumble over ill-kept pavements. Our house, our block, our entire street has gone – like Carthage, like Sodom and Gomorrah. Instead of rows of neat, carefully maintained apartment houses, a mere three or four storeys high, there are now identical cliffs of industrialized buildings: assembled by crane, mastic shot roughly between the slabs with pressure-guns – rational, perhaps, but not built with hand and trowel and pride in workmanship. This hastily rebuilt town is full of new settlers, transplanted from Eastern lands. In Poland they refer to it as ‘our Wild West’. They say it is young, brash, rough. To me, an alien place. At a deserted street corner I hail a taxi. Next morning the students unveil a monument on one of the islands in the Odra. I think of it still as the Oder: pale blue wintry sky and the delicate spires of churches and bishops’ palaces at the heart of the old city. ‘When we regained Wroclaw’ – says a new guidebook – ‘only the stones spoke Polish.’ History revised! These slender Gothic spires date from the resettlement after the Hun invasion, after 1249. The settlers then were Germans, and some Jews. Curious, even in the Nazi period my schoolbooks admitted that in those days the aristocracy had been Polish, the peasantry Polish, while the townsfolk were German. But now these stones are labelled Polish. How beautiful is this string of silent islands in the midst of a busy city. High on the wall of the cathedral is the carving of a weeping face. My guide tells me: ‘Legend has it that there was once a man …’ I dimly remember ‘he grieved about the loss of his fortune. But then, miraculously, this weeping face appeared on the cathedral, not carved by human hand. And he was cured of his grief.’ That’s right. At least our legends agree. The students erect their monument, their offering to this city. Cine-cameras whirr. Balloons are released into the air. A student makes a mock serious speech. A government minister replies in a similar vein: ‘This unique contribution ... truly indicative of the spirit of our young.’ The monument? A great oak – erected upside down! The hacked-off roots stretch clumsily into the wintry pale sky. What fun these people are, how un-Germanic. Their balloons float up past the delicate spires. So am I, the alien, the only one here who has roots in this soil? Of all this assembly, am I the only one whose ancestors lie in this earth? 9

SILESIA I excuse myself. I have a private errand that I have not discussed with my new Polish friends, though they might well understand. I take a tram south again, then wander through once-familiar streets. It is curious how selective memory is: I well remember this red brick hospital. I was rushed here once, after an accident. But I had forgotten the great water tower next to it. Do memories of violence last longest? I come to the high wall that I am looking for. I walk around it, searching for the entrance, but I seem to have lost my sense of direction. It is not where I remember it. Then I realize that it has been bricked up. But a little further the wall is replaced by a few yards of fencing, apparently replacing a shell-damaged wall. There is a gate, but it is padlocked. There must be another entrance somewhere, a caretaker. I walk right round the walled cemetery, but I do not find either. I had forgotten it was so large: high walls everywhere, a few shell holes. I rattle at the padlocked gate and call. No reply. I detect that at one point the wire mesh is loose and can be bent back. Others have found their way through here before me. Who? Where from? From Argentina? From California? Australia? The grandchildren of the dead from the far corners of the earth? My heavy coat gets caught as I push my way through the gap. I look around surreptitiously. But who here can claim a greater right to enter than I? I strip off my coat, climb through and pull the coat after me. I walk through the mortuary chapel – burnt-out and roofless. At some stage workmen had started to repair it. Rough wooden scaffolding is still up and rolls of roofing felt are stacked in the corner. But bags of lime have long hardened and ivy has grown over the roofing felt. Beyond the chapel I am no longer visible from outside this city of the dead; nine-foot walls enclose me, secure, alone. Here no one speaks a foreign language. In fact, here are the first signs in German that I have seen in this town: ‘Unser innig geliebter Vater, Grossvater.’ German and Hebrew: ‘Rest in peace.’ Yes, that they do, all these worthy gentlemen with the titles and honours of another period: Geheimer Kommerzienrat, Justizrat, Oberregierungsrat, Sanitätsrat, Konsulatsverweser – the coveted honours and titles of assimilation, of acceptance. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ‘He walked in the paths of righteousness.’ And repeatedly ‘The memory of the just endureth forever.’ Does it? I walk, as does a sleepwalker. I know the layout of this place as if I had walked here regularly these 35 years – as I walked as a child on 10

ROOTS IN THE AIR birthdays and death days when my mother and my grandmother would visit family graves. Perhaps I have retraced our steps in dreams ever since? And yet it is changed, utterly changed. It has become a place of extraordinary beauty. Trees have grown wild, branches fallen across paved paths. The paths are deep in autumn leaves. Bushes have proliferated among the graves. Ivy has spread and covers the tombstones. Some of the stones have fallen; others are leaning askew. I have read of ancient temples in Cambodia, overrun by the jungle. Here, within my own lifetime – and I am not yet grey – this place has returned to the wild. Perhaps before it was too trim. Now, enclosed, abandoned, silent (I can hear only the far-distant clanking of trams and the wind in the trees) this has become an enchanted place. Perhaps the memory of just men does not endure, but their ashes do rest in peace. Every gust of wind brings down more autumn leaves, gold and brown. At the place where the path bends, there used to be a tap where I was sent to fill watering cans. And indeed, it is still there, rusty and bent. And here was the grave of my father’s father. But where? My grandmother was buried next to him – or so we read in a brief letter that came to us in central Africa via the Red Cross, in the midst of war. But where is the black, square marble tombstone? I am puzzled. The layout is as I remember it, but the stone is missing. Has it fallen? Is it beneath the ivy? I step on the grave mounds. There is no sign of the stone. And yet, all around, others are standing – columns and pillars and obelisks, some askew, but standing. Could I be on the wrong path? I become anxious. Have I got my orientation in this familiar, intimate place wrong? Are there other, parallel paths? I pace through the great cemetery rapidly. I make for the grave of my mother’s father. Again, the place is exactly as I anticipated it. With certainty, I make my way through deep drifts of leaves. How I loved wading through autumn leaves as a child! I find my way to where the grave should be. But again – where is it? The tombs behind look vaguely familiar. Ivy makes wild cap-like coverings over the stones. They stand like green sentinels among the carpet of fallen autumn leaves. The white trunks of birches and the dark ones of cypresses encompass me. I pull angrily at ivy to uproot it. It clings to the ground and to fallen tombstones. I walk over mounds – should I? I am hoping to stumble across the marble slab that stood tall over his grave. Could it really be that in all this city of the dead, only the graves of my grandfathers were thought worth robbing? Have they repolished the black marble to make some grandiose monument to a Soviet tank corps? 11

SILESIA I stray, uncomprehendingly, through this vast, walled, silent space. Who has been here before me? Am I the first in all those years to recall ‘our never to be forgotten father, husband’, the first in three decades to recall the memory of the just, and of some not so just? Have all the others who might have remembered perished in gas chambers? Or are they dispersed in all the world and so afraid of the line that divides Europe that they have never dared come back? I step across a fallen tree trunk. I see the names of people we used to talk about when I was a child, but never a relative. ‘His life was labour. May his soul rest in peace.’ I see curious, archaic German spelling, bad verse in the taste of another era. And then I see signs of life, of disturbance: hostile swastikas painted on gravestones. Has the paint survived these thirty or more years? No, the desecration is more recent: these are mirror images of the swastika. This is a mistake no German would have made. And then I see the grave of Ferdinand Lassalle, the nineteenthcentury pioneer of German social democracy, the man who challenged Bismarck. I remember my father explaining to me: he was buried against the outer wall because the rabbis judged his death to be a suicide. He died in a duel over a society lady. The rabbis had no taste for such deaths. My great-grandmother was buried just opposite. I scarcely expect to find her gravestone. And I don’t. Am I mad? Or dreaming? Did we really ever live in this city? Lassalle’s grave shows recent activity – a new marble slab with a Polish inscription – THE PIONEER OF SOCIALISM. But the slab has been attacked with crowbars and thrown sideways. Again there are mirror images of swastikas. Who was this violence aimed at? The socialist? The Jew? The German? Then I come upon the one and only family grave I found – that of my great-grand-aunt Friederike. I stand and laugh out loud. Relief? Hysteria? Or? This, you must know, is the infamous Friederike Kempner, the Silesian Swan, indisputably the worst poetess in the German language. She published her first volume of maiden auntish verse in the 1870s, at her own expense, and her family bought up the edition behind her back and had it burnt. Emboldened by what she took to be quick sales she reprinted, again and again: eight more volumes of ballads, aphorisms, epitaphs and campaign hymns. They are still being republished today, the works of this ‘genius of the unintentionally comic’ – as one critic called her. Surviving copies of the early editions, the ones the family tried to suppress, now fetch higher prices than first editions of Goethe! Epitaphs for her dead parrot, 12

ROOTS IN THE AIR ballads denouncing the cruelty of training circus animals, appeals to the kings of Prussia to build mortuaries: Wisst Ihr nicht wie weh das tut wenn man wach im Grabe ruht? Know ye not how sore we ache, lying in the grave – awake? Her spirited campaign resulted in a change of law, decreeing three days’ delay before any burial. Oh, she was a formidable comic maiden aunt, and she herself took no chances: the family story has it she was buried here with a bell push in her hand and a wire to the mortuary. I think: ‘And what do I do if it starts ringing now?’ And that is why I was laughing hysterically. I wandered about the cemetery for nearly two hours. There was no doubt about it – the memorials to all the rest of my family had disappeared. I never asked about it. Not in Wroclaw. I was afraid that my Polish acquaintances would send me back in a large car with a municipal official and an interpreter and disturb this private sanctuary. But weeks later, back in London, I read how in the last days of Breslau the defenders had gone and robbed the cemeteries of tombstones – to build barricades. And then I understood: slabs that, piled up flat, would make barricades had all gone, and all my family had been buried with such slabs at their heads. The columns and obelisks and marble panels on outer walls remained, more or less, intact. Oh yes, we were good Germans! ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1916’ said my grandfather’s watch chain. He had donated gold to the war effort and received iron. After 1918 he gave up a career and a home further east – to remain German. And in death, in the last days of Breslau, he had given marble for barricades. I walked in silence for a long time. I tried to puzzle out, like an archaeologist, when the builders had abandoned their attempt to rebuild the ruined mortuary. Was it during the exodus of the remnant of Jews from Poland in the 1950s? Generations of my family had passed through this hall, now roofless. Had history been different, my father would have followed them, too. And I, too, might do so, when my time comes. Voices disturbed my thoughts. Quickly I stepped behind the wall: women’s voices, quite near, speaking Polish. I brace myself for questions, explanations. But who here would dare deny me access to this place? I pulled myself up and walked out of the ruined hall. 13

SILESIA And then I saw that a small corner of the cemetery had never been used for graves. History had got in the way. Two tubby women with kerchiefs round their heads were hoeing a vegetable garden there – peasants, no doubt, from the lands that the Russians had seized, old women uprooted from their ancestral soil and thrust amid the concrete cliffs. And here, within these high walls, they had discovered a secret plot of earth to cultivate. Perhaps it was they who had made the hole in the fence, not others on my errand. When they noticed me they called to me, perhaps asking who I was, perhaps telling me of some better exit. I merely nodded. Had I known how, I would have wished them a good harvest. I pushed my way through the fence and back into the city of clanking trams, and workers hurrying from factories, and bright-eyed crowds in theatres, and students who have raised up a tree with roots in the air.

14

Chapter 2

But we were Germans My Polish guide broached the subject early next morning. ‘Do you mind my asking, but why didn’t you get out earlier? Couldn’t you see what was going to happen? I have been asked before and often since. No, we could not see it. It is so easy to be wise after events. We were Germans. We certainly considered ourselves as such. So did our non-Jewish neighbours – or most of them, anyway. We had deep roots in that soil. Our ancestors had settled there seven centuries earlier – far earlier than any white or black man in America. A photograph of my first day at school shows me in a sailor suit. The naval cap I wear has emblazoned on it the name of a battleship: Deutschland. I am certain it would never have entered the mind of my parents to think this incongruous. Not when that photo was taken. Even a century earlier the Jewish-born poet Heinrich Heine had had no doubt he was a German. He wrote: ‘each people has its national faults. We Germans have ours … our well-known slowness. … We have lead in our boots, even in our bedroom slippers.’ We Germans! People read history backwards. Relations between Jews and Germans have changed so greatly in my lifetime that it came as a shock to read that Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, repeatedly expressed the hope that a Jewish settlement in Palestine would become a German protectorate: ‘To live under the protection of this strong, great, moral, splendidly governed, tightly organized Germany can only have the most salutary effect on the Jewish national character.’ Germany was our home, unsere Heimat. In some ways it remains that to me to this day, despite all that has happened. In my dreams I still see the ice floes breaking in spring and floating down the River Oder; I still feel the summer warmth on my cheeks, as I lie beside that great river, in sun-drenched water meadows, chewing sorrel. I wade ankle-deep in rustling, reddish autumn leaves in the forests around my native city; I still feel the wind in my hair as my toboggan speeds 15

SILESIA

1. My cap said DEUTSCHLAND but big grandfather and my mother kept from me what was happening in the fatherland on my first day of school.

through pine trees, heavy with snow, down towards distant Sudeten valleys. One cannot tear the past out of one’s life. We were happy there, happy until fairly near the end. My grandparents and great-grandparents had not found Germany hostile. It was France in La Belle Époque that had been a hostile place for Jews, following the Dreyfus affair. So of course had been Russia or Romania, but those seemed to us places beyond the confines of the civilized world. When grandfather Fraenkel, my tall grandfather, took me with him, aged four or perhaps five, to an exhibition for Heldengedenktag

16

BUT WE WERE GERMANS (the day of remembrance of heroes) officers in smart uniforms clicked their heels and saluted him. Grandfather stopped, a tall, dignified old man, and chatted to one of the officers. They bent over a relief map of the Battle of Sedan in discussion. Grandfather lifted me up – I must have been too small to see the top of the table. The officer pointed. ‘This is where the French positions were. And it was from here that the Prussian army mounted its charge.’ Later grandfather explained to my mother. ‘An old acquaintance, Colonel von X; we served on military tribunals together. He was also a Maikäfer, after my time of course.’ Ein Maikäfer? A May bug? I thought I knew about May bugs – especially the chocolate ones we were given at Easter time. Nor was I unfamiliar with the real thing: the whirring insect that sometimes got caught in girls’ hair. It was fun to see them scream. What had my grandfather and that heel-clicking officer to do with these? I would have to grow quite a lot older before I discovered why these grown-ups claimed to be insects and how that, in turn, resulted in grandfather becoming a judge at military tribunals. Grandfather Arnold had been the youngest of 12, the son of an inspector of breweries for the Count of Tost in Upper Silesia. His birth certificate says he was born at Schloss Tost, the ducal chateau. No doubt this event did not take place in the staterooms but in the staff quarters. His father had, I presume, a modest income but with his 11 older children off his hands, he decided that he could now afford to send his last born to university. So in 1879 grandfather was sent to study law. Having an Abitur (the higher school certificate) made grandfather an Einjähriger – one of a privileged minority who would only have to do one year of military service instead of three. (Later this was reduced to two.) A ‘one-year-man’ coming from a privileged class became an officer more or less automatically, but not if he were a Jew. A converted Jew might overcome this obstacle, but one who remained true to the faith of his ancestors could not. There were some very rare exceptions, such as the son of Bismarck’s banker Bleichröder. Old man Bleichröder played a key part in the unification of Germany. He financed Bismarck’s unification campaign in defiance of a parliament determined to withhold finances. Despite all this, fellow officers found ways of having young Bleichröder cashiered. At festivities to celebrate the emperor’s escape from an assassination attempt he was, allegedly, seen in the company of women of ill repute! But to come back to my tall grandfather: some worldly-wise uncle pulled the 18-year-old aside: ‘Why should you have to put up with a year of square-bashing with peasant lads – louse-ridden, too, many of 17

SILESIA them. I’ll tell you what you do. Don’t wait to be called up. Take a train to Berlin and report at the Maikäfer barracks, the Imperial Guard. Volunteer! That’s the elite regiment. The tops. Comes the medical inspection and they’ll spot that you’re circumcised. ‘Jew?’ (In Germany circumcision was virtually unheard of among non-Jews.) ‘Jawohl, Herr Lieutenant!’ You realize what will happen? They’ll declare you medically unfit for military service. They don’t take Jews into such a prestigious regiment. But once a medical commission has declared you unfit, you can go back to your law studies and you won’t have to waste a year in barracks.’ Young Arnold did as instructed. But the world was changing. Prejudice against circumcised Imperial Guards was not as strong as the uncle imagined. The selection board took one look at my tall, broad-shouldered grandfather. I imagine them twirling their moustaches – perhaps those curious waxed ones, pointing towards the heavens – a style sported in later years by the last of the German Kaisers. It was known popularly as Es ist erreicht! ‘It’s been achieved’. I have had to imagine what the selection board looked like. What they actually said has come down to me. My father told me on our nightly walks along the ‘tarmac’ in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia. ‘Splendid physical specimen,’ they said. ‘Look at those shoulders. Yes, yes: just the sort of material we need.’ So grandfather became a May bug – the nickname for the GardeFüselier-Regiment. It was street urchins who first gave them that name in the 1830s because each May different battalions of the regiment gathered at Potsdam for their annual manoeuvres. In the end even the king addressed them by that name. Arnold never became an officer. Liberalization had not gone that far. But all his life he was proud of having served in one of the most prestigious, perhaps the most prestigious regiment of Imperial Germany. It was peacetime. He was born too late to participate in the Franco–Prussian War, and too early for the First World War. Grandfather would say to me (I must have been four or five) as I accompanied him on walks in the Glogau park: ‘Stand up straight: Shoulders pulled back. No slouching. One can always recognize a man who has served with the Guards – by his stance.’ There was no denying it: aged four or five I had not served in the Imperial Guard. There was no more Imperial Guard when I was born, or an empire. But I could not help laughing out aloud, much to the puzzlement of a French physiotherapist, when more than 60 years 18

BUT WE WERE GERMANS later he addressed me firmly – ‘Stand up straight; shoulders pulled back; no slouching.’ But that man knew nothing about Imperial Guards. Grandfather Arnold always walked upright and straight. By 1906 Kaiser Wilhelm II – the one with the ‘it’s been achieved’ moustache – elevated him to Justizrat, a purely honorific title for a wellrespected lawyer. But titles were greatly valued in that world. I still have the nomination document with its megalomaniac imperial signature. Later, in the more liberal days of the Weimar Republic grandfather was appointed a civilian judge at military tribunals, which is why officers of the garrison saluted him. In the First World War my father, unlike his, might have become an officer: by 1916 the mutual massacres on the western front were such that the German army promoted – incredible as it seemed at the time – even Jews. To be a Jew and a German officer! That seemed beyond the dreams of mere mortals. My father did not aspire to such glory. Much later, on those moonlit walks in Northern Rhodesia, he would explain to me that of a large number of his Jewish fellow students who did become officers only one survived. They thought it dulce et decorum to die for the fatherland: preferably, he said, leading an infantry charge against a totally untakeable enemy machine-gun entrenchment, British or French. They were determined to prove that Jews were not cowards. ‘Der Dank des Vaterlands ist euch gewiss,’ said a slogan of that time, ‘you can be certain of the gratitude of the fatherland.’ My father certainly did not foresee just how the fatherland would express its gratitude. He simply had a lust for survival. One of my mother’s ex-boyfriends – Jew, captain of infantry, Iron Cross class one – did survive the trenches. He ended up at Auschwitz, gassed together with his wife and their ten children. He had resolutely refused to emigrate. He was certain of our fatherland’s gratitude! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My father, Hans, studied law and for a while served as his own father’s junior. In the end he opted for the civil service, which at that time was a prestigious occupation. It did not have quite the same status as that of an army officer in the Kaiser’s days, but it was not all that far below. Your earnings were modest as a civil servant, but the social position made up for it. Moreover, my father knew, or thought he knew, that he would, eventually, come into comfortable inheritances from both parents and parents-in-law. Many years later, when he lived in near poverty – as laundryman and drycleaner in Northern Rhodesia – he 19

SILESIA would derive some wry satisfaction from working out what he would have inherited if the German inflation had never occurred and if the Nazis had never come to power. As a civil servant he was posted to the small provincial town of Cosel in Upper Silesia where for some years he acted as head of the income tax department. Cosel had its own small-town ‘society’ and my parents were part of it. There was Dr Krämser, the head of the local hospital and Mrs Krämser. There was a worldly and witty Catholic priest whose name I have forgotten; there was Gerhard Neumann, an artist who had studied with Léger in Paris and now taught art at the local secondary school; Herr Gutfreund owned and ran the local brewery and Herr Praetorius, a descendant of seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century composers, was the manager of a local factory. He played the viola, my father the violin and they were part of a local quartet. There was also Frau Brauer, the widow of a lawyer, and her son who aspired to be a novelist. He wore wide-brimmed black hats and red scarves, in imitation of that Toulouse-Lautrec poster. This created some amusement in that provincial town. The circle was predominantly Gentile, but so far as I have been told anti-Semitism was not an issue in the late 1920s – not in that circle anyway. In fact, my father once mentioned that he might have owed his posting to Cosel, which he greatly enjoyed, to being a Jew. In Upper Silesia there was tension between Protestants and Catholics. A Jew was seen as a neutral. There must have been much that as a child I did not know: religious and ethnic tensions; economic depression; the growth of the Nazi movement; social snobbery. Take the last: 50 years later I met a lady born in Cosel. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘my parents were not on visiting terms with yours. You see, my parents were in trade!’ There were cousins of my father’s ‘in trade’ in nearby Gleiwitz (now the Polish town of Gliwice). Unfortunately, their tax affairs came within my father’s jurisdiction. He had a great many cousins, most of whom he knew only slightly, his father having been the youngest of 12. His Berg cousins were an embarrassment to him. They had a reputation as shady businessmen, which in Prussian official circles at that period may have meant no more than that their tax returns were a little suspect. My father passed their files to a junior and delegated all decisions. He never revealed that these Bergs were his cousins. Once he came across one of them in the streets of a neighbouring town and pretended not to recognize him. The memory of this incident made him uneasy. Thirty or more years later, in central Africa, he still talked about it. 20

BUT WE WERE GERMANS ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My father took a ‘constitutional’ walk after dinner every evening and I often accompanied him: first in Breslau, occasionally during practice black-outs; later along ‘the tarmac’ – the only tarred road of an African town, carrying a torch to light our way. In the first years there I felt displaced and alienated from Africa as he did himself. I grew out of that very soon. He never did. When I begged him to tell me about the world we had escaped from he was always pleased to do so: he told me about Moisse’s fine stage presence as Hamlet; about candlelit concerts in Frederick the Great’s palace in Breslau; about the Latin drinking songs of his student fraternity; about the aloof bearing of impoverished Prussian landowners. Much of what he related seems to me now as if I had experienced it myself: als wär’s ein Stück von mir. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ How Jewish were we? My father told me he had not entered a synagogue between his Bar Mitzvah and marriage and then not again until my own Bar Mitzvah. Yet the thought of converting to Christianity was unacceptable. Remaining Jewish was a matter of honour, not of religious conviction. Conversion smacked of opportunism, a dishonest way of gaining a career advantage. My father would quote a quip of Heinrich Heine’s, ‘had stealing silver spoons been legal, I would never have accepted conversion.’ Grandmother Sophie often told me that her own brother Ernst Spiro, one of the senior engineers in the state railways, had (in the ‘good old days’ of the Kaiser) been offered the job of managing director of the entire German railway network if only he would accept conversion. He had refused. I have checked the story with Uncle Ernst’s son: yes, he confirmed, his father had refused a promotion on such conditions. But no! The promotion on offer had not been to a post quite as elevated as Grandmother Sophie had claimed. With my grandmother, stories that advanced the glory of the family grew in the retelling. What grandmother did, however, never tell me was that there had been a convert in the family. It was, in fact, the cousin she boasted about most frequently: Fritz Haber, chemist, Nobel prize winner, director of Germany’s leading research institute, the KaiserWilhelm-Institut in Berlin. The Haber-Bosch process of extracting nitrogen from the air is the basis of modern fertilisers. Was her cousin then one of the great benefactors of mankind? Well, yes and no…! 21

SILESIA Nitrates are also essential for explosives. Without this process German production of explosives would have been throttled. Germany could not have fought the long 1914–18 war while cut off, by naval blockade, from South American nitrate supplies. Worse is to come: Haber devised the German poison gas campaign during that war. His first wife committed suicide saying she could not bear to be married to a mass murderer. In the 1920s this super-patriot thought up a way of liberating his fatherland from the burden of reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. He devised a method of retrieving gold from seawater by stationing factory ships near the mouth of the Amazon. For this project the Weimar Republic put large funds at his disposal. He did indeed succeed in retrieving gold, but not in quantities sufficient to make the project economically viable. Haber suffered a nervous breakdown. So far as grandmother told me, neither his poison-gas campaign nor his wife’s suicide had driven him to such straits. Moreover, grandmother never told me that he had converted to Protestantism. Could it be that she did not know? I doubt it. He had never made a secret of it. I have since read that, as a student, he justified his conversion to his friends saying that as a rational scientist he felt no ties to the ancient religion. However, he did feel 100 per cent German and by conversion he hoped to remove the last barrier that separated him from his compatriots. When new barriers did arise with the coming of Hitler, Haber reverted to Judaism. ‘I have never felt so Jewish as now.’ He even accepted an invitation from Chaim Weitzman, himself a prominent scientist and the future president of Israel, to come and visit his research institute at Rehovot in Palestine. But Haber never did reach the land of his ancestors. Perhaps the stress was too great. He died of a heart attack in Switzerland. Another matter grandmother never communicated to me concerned her brother Georg. No, he did not convert to Christianity. Worse: he was a Naumannianer! Uncle Georg was an eye specialist in Berlin. He visited Breslau on rare occasions, too rarely I thought. Each time he came he made me a present of five marks. This was great wealth to me. But, hand on heart, that was not the only reason I liked Georg. He was unlike other members of my sedate family. He had travelled the world as a ship’s doctor. He had been battered by typhoons in the South Seas. He had climbed Mount Fuji. He was a keen botanist and encouraged my own interest in the subject. He would show me poisonous plants that some far-distant peoples used on their arrowheads. He encouraged me to identify plants and was full 22

BUT WE WERE GERMANS of praise when I did so correctly. On long climbs up Mount Zobten near Breslau he would deliver lectures on the plants we came across, but I was the only one who appeared interested. Georg is a familiar figure to my sons – born a quarter of a century after his death – because of a malapropism of their grandmother’s. ‘Uncle Georg’, she informed them, ‘exposed himself on the Matterhorn.’ What she was trying to convey was that he contracted a kidney complaint after a night of exposure in freezing fog, sheltering in a hollow on the Matterhorn. It eventually killed him. He was a bachelor – at least so the family thought. At his funeral an unknown lady turned up in deep mourning. She remained discreetly in the background, but when approached by Uncle Ernst, she informed him that she was Georg’s wife! When the incredulous brother went through Georg’s papers, he found that this was perfectly true. The family never got to the bottom of the mystery. Or perhaps they did, but they hid the truth. However, what now puzzles me more about Georg is his politics: a Naumannianer! He belonged to the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden – the League of National-German Jews. This was a minute political group that got as close as any Jews could get to supporting the Nazis. One Dr Max Naumann founded the league in 1921 (that is before there was a Nazi party). He was a Berlin lawyer and a highly decorated former army captain. The movement was strongly anti-Zionist. Naumann argued that German Jews should make it crystal clear that they were Germans and did not divide their loyalties between the fatherland and any such crazy project as a Jewish state. Jews were not a nation. German Jews were Germans, just like German Catholics or German Protestants. Naumann went further. He denounced Zionists as protégés of the British – the enemies of the fatherland in the recent war. With equal fervour he denounced Jewish leftists for their antimilitarism but more especially for their internationalism. This, he argued, could only reinforce the anti-Semites’ image of Jews as cosmopolitans devoid of true German feeling. Naumann agitated against Jewish immigration from eastern Europe into Germany: ‘pitiful creatures ... of a not quite human level’ is how he described Ostjuden. On the other hand, the movement emphasized the Jewishness of its members and, in the early years, refused membership to the baptized. The league attracted very little support in the Jewish community, but much antagonism. It appears it never had more than 3500 members. Their overtures to right-wing conservative parties were largely rebuffed. Undeterred, the league regularly called upon its members to vote for candidates of the right. Naumann even went so far as to 23

SILESIA express support for a Hitler government as the ‘only political organization capable of bringing about a rebirth of the German spirit’. The statement created outrage among the Jewish community and even members of the league thought he had gone too far. What Uncle Georg thought of this I do not know. We talked plants, not politics. Naumann was forced to explain, somewhat lamely, that his devotion was not to the Nazis in particular but to the entire national coalition, which comprised several right-wing parties of which the Nazis were only one. When the Nazis eventually did come to power they banned the league and imprisoned Dr Naumann. You can be certain of the gratitude of the fatherland! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ How Jewish were we? Pork was eaten in our household. However, I was circumcised and it caused eyebrows to be raised when one of my cousins was not. Grandfather Arnold was chairman of the Glogau Jewish community and attended services at a liberal (namely nonorthodox) synagogue, where the prayers were largely conducted in German. Attitudes to Judaism were ambivalent and complicated, as among many German middle-class Jews. To deny one’s origins was disreputable. On the other hand one strove to appear as un-Jewish as possible. It was comparatively rare for Jews to discard family names. Anyway, family names were not always a clear indication of religious descent. Rosenberg, for example, is frequently a Jewish name. However, the Nazi’s chief ideologue, sentenced to death at Nuremberg, was one Alfred Rosenberg. Anne Frank of diary fame carried a family name common among Jews, but she shared it with one of the most vicious of the Nazis, the governor-general of occupied Poland, Hans Frank. However, when it came to praenomen (I am avoiding the term Christian names) bourgeois Jews selected them cautiously so as not to signal ‘Jew’. Names like David or Samuel or Aaron or Moses were avoided because in Germany they were exclusively Jewish. But it is a Jewish custom to name children after a deceased ancestor. This called for some flexibility. Aaron became Arnold, as with my tall grandfather. Moses became Moritz, as with my own father, Hans Moritz Fraenkel. My second praenomen is Joachim, inherited from a great-grandfather. Though of Hebrew origin, this created no problem. Joachim was in common use among German Gentiles. Even Hitler’s foreign minister was one Joachim von Ribbentrop! 24

BUT WE WERE GERMANS In 1939 the Nazis passed legislation to compel Jews to adopt additional names: men were forced to take on the name of Israel while women had to add Sarah. I presume this was so that they and their documents could be more easily identified. I recall my father arguing with Uncle Max Spiro. ‘But Max, you must go to the registry office before the end of the month. You run the risk of prosecution if you don’t.’ Max refused. In the end he admitted sheepishly that his full name was Max Moses Spiro. Moses was a name only orthodox Jews gave their children and thus – under the new decree – it dispensed Max from adopting the additional name Israel. But Max had never previously admitted to the name Moses. There was a strong element of self-hatred among German Jews. ‘Don’t talk with your hands,’ my father would say. ‘Don’t gesticulate. It’s so, so Jewish.’ I learnt to defy that parental injunction. In later years, when I trained broadcasters, I always advised them to gesticulate in front of that blind microphone. It improved voice communication. Self-hatred? Ludwig Bamberger, a leading Jewish left-wing parliamentarian of the Bismarck era, in one of his essays praised the Jewish capacity for self-criticism as one of our cardinal virtues. He himself certainly had that virtue! In that same essay he lists Jewish failings: ‘pushiness and tactlessness, greed, insolence, vanity ... intellectual parvenuism and servility’. Redemption, he argued, was in becoming like German Gentiles – perhaps even more German than the Germans. I recall attending services in the Breslau liberal synagogue with my tall grandfather: Once I saw the shammes or beadle approach a worshipper who was rocking back and forth and beating his breast. He whispered something in the man’s ear. Grandfather explained to me later that the worshipper would have been asked to preserve proper decorum. Protestant-style silence was demanded during a service. Yet this is totally at variance with Jewish tradition. As a child I was made to believe that this lack of decorum only stemmed from uncouth Ostjuden – the unwashed from Poland or Lithuania or Russia. It was a myth! Rocking at prayer, beating one’s breast and, moreover, chatting to one’s friends during those long high holiday services had been the custom in Germany for centuries, just as it was further east. Our rabbi in Northern Rhodesia – himself an Ostjude – told a story to illustrate the difference in cultural attitudes: a German Jew visits Poland. He sees a Jewish coachman at his morning prayers – prayer shawl over his shoulders, tefillin (phylacteries) tied to his head and arm. The man is rocking back and forth, beating his breast and calling 25

SILESIA upon his Maker. At the same time, he is greasing the wheels of his cart. The German Jew is outraged. An eastern Jew observes the same scene. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘what a pious man! Even while greasing his cart he is praying.’ Language? Take jüdeln, speaking German with an insinuating, lilting singsong (mimicking the melodies of Yiddish). This was frowned on in my family. So was the use of words of Yiddish origin that survived in German-Jewish usage: words like risches (antiSemitism), kowet (honour, respect) and nebbich (pity, alas). If they were employed at all, it was only in all-Jewish company. Even within the family there were words that my parents would not permit: words like goyim or schickse. Literally goyim only means ‘the people’ – but over the years it had become a term of contempt for non-Jews; schikse is an even more derogatory term for a non-Jewish girl, carrying the distasteful subtext ‘okay for a fuck; out of the question for marriage.’ My father would have been very angry had I used such terms. Among the words of Hebrew origin that had come into German via Yiddish some were, however, acceptable, words like ganove (thief) or chutzpah (cheek). Why? Because they had been adopted into German Gentile usage. No one I knew spoke or even admitted to understanding the Yiddish language. It had disappeared from Germany a century or more earlier. The last Yiddish book published in Germany appeared in the 1830s. My father related that one of his grandmothers corresponded with her intimates in German but used the Hebrew alphabet. ‘Yiddish?’ I asked. He denied this with a vehemence that astonished me. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Of course it was German. She sometimes read me the letters she received from her sister.’ These letters must have been in a half-way variant described by scholars as Jüdisch-deutsch, namely standard High German written in the Hebrew alphabet but incorporating a few words of Hebrew origin. It lingered on while there were still Jews who were more familiar with the Hebrew alphabet than the German. The following generation dropped it. My great-great-grandfather, the printer-publisher B. L. Monasch, in the 1850s wrote his diary in standard German but he relates that he published books – the Five Books of Moses for example – with a ‘German translation printed in both German and Hebrew letters’. For a German speaker Yiddish is not at all difficult to learn, but it 26

BUT WE WERE GERMANS was not a done thing. In fact, I had never heard Yiddish spoken until I found myself among Lithuanian Jews in central Africa. There I learnt it. I now boast how well I can cope. Of course, I exaggerate. Am I overcompensating? Eastern Jews in kaftans and with paiyes (side locks) were an embarrassing sight, which – Gott sei Dank! – one was spared in Germany itself. However, across the border in Czechoslovakia in Marienbad (Marianske Lazne) we met them. My parents went there occasionally to take the waters. ‘This sort of thing gives rise to antiSemitism,’ my father would grumble. In this one respect, I am afraid, Dr Naumann of the League of National-German Jews expressed sentiments that were widely shared by German Jews, even those antagonistic to his politics. The rise of anti-Semitism was often attributed to the great influx of Ostjuden after 1918. Hostility to these immigrants was strong. They must have been an uncomfortable reminder of what ‘we’ had been like two or three generations earlier. And yet my father told me that when he was serving in Lithuania during the First World War, local Jews – kaftan-clad and with side locks – discovered a coreligionist among the occupying troops. They invited him to Friday night dinner and in this environment, so alien to him, my father said he felt warmly at home. That always puzzled him. How Jewish were we? Grandfather Goldschmidt – my little grandfather, five foot plus very little, topped by a large intellectual’s head – served on the steering committee of the Breslau Jewish community. As a prominent lawyer he would have been useful. However, he never once took me to a service. Neither of his two daughters was taught a word of Hebrew, nor did they receive any religious instruction. Grandmother related that, after they married, he persuaded her to give up fasting on the Day of Atonement. ‘I’ll take the sin upon myself,’ he promised her. So far as I remember only Passover was commemorated in his household, but without the long traditional recitation of the story of the exodus of our ancestors from the land of Egypt. Wherefore, then, was that night different from other nights? Only because we ate bouillon with Matzeklösse (matzo dumplings) and matzo was served at table – the unleavened bread to remind us of the hasty flight of the Children of Israel from the Pharaohs, so precipitate that they could not wait for the dough to rise. However, the strict ban on the eating of ordinary leavened bread during the days of Passover was ignored. Zionism? Until the rise of the Nazis, Zionism made few recruits in Germany. Curiously, my father was a very early one. He studied 27

SILESIA jurisprudence at three different universities – Freiburg, Berlin and Breslau. It was the custom to move every one or two semesters. In this way a student could attend the lectures of many of the most prominent jurists in the country. It would have been a lonely life, living in digs in strange towns, but for the Burschenschaften – the student fraternities. A fraternity would have a clubhouse at every university and these became the students’ homes from home. Frequent meetings with a prescribed ritual of singing and drinking and speech making provided instant camaraderie. Friendships formed, sometimes lasting for life. On special occasions, a fraternity paraded in peaked caps and sashes, each with its own distinctive colours. Fencing practice and duelling were an important part of student life. A man had to be able to defend his ‘honour’. Real or imagined offences were met with a challenge to a duel. British and American Second World War films caricature most ‘Huns’ with disfiguring duelling scars. In fact, only universityeducated men had them. Professional officers, namely graduates from military academies, did not. Since Hollywood was packed with German émigrés they should have known better. The student fraternities originated in the Middle Ages, and some of their rituals and many of their drinking songs were in Latin. But the fraternities gradually became snobbish, chauvinistic and usually right wing. Most fraternities did not admit Jews, so the Jews founded their own. ‘Their aim was to show that Jews could hold their own in duelling, brawling, drinking and singing, just like other people,’ says Arthur Koestler. Assimilation! It was customary for one or two older students to visit a freshman to try and recruit him for their fraternity. I do not think that my father, naïve and just up from a small provincial town, had any idea of the political orientation of different fraternities. A Zionist fraternity canvassed him and, flattered by the interest they took in him, he became a member. There were, by then, several Jewish fraternities but only one or two were Zionist. He took fencing lessons but I do not think he ever took part in a real duel – one without protective masks. He certainly had no Hunnish scars. Many years later, in Northern Rhodesia, a visiting lecturer in the Jewish community hall spoke about the early struggles of the Zionist movement in Germany and about that small heroic band who had held high the blue-and-white flag in the hostile climate of assimilation. He mentioned several pioneers who had become prominent in the new state of Israel. My father went up to chat to the man after the 28

BUT WE WERE GERMANS lecture and said that he had known several of these people in his youth. They had been fellow members of the same fraternity in the early 1900s. ‘But Mr Fraenkel,’ said the astonished lecturer, ‘then you are one of our pioneers yourself.’ ‘It’s not quite so simple,’ said my father, blushing. ‘You see, when I got back home my family and their friends teased me mercilessly. They regarded Zionism as a joke. That was the attitude at the time. They even wrote a comic poem about my marching in the ranks of the Maccabeans. They recited it at family gatherings. The following semester, when I moved from Freiburg to Berlin, I joined a nonZionist fraternity. So you see, I can’t really claim to be one of your pioneers!’ (The Maccabeans were the leaders of a Jewish revolt against the Hellenistic rulers of Syria and Palestine in the second century BC.) Over 40 years later my father still remembered a few verses of the lampoon. He recited it to me once safely out of earshot. The writing of comic verse, recited on birthdays, marriages and other get-togethers, was a well-established custom. The worse the verse the better! Words were distorted to make them scan and rhyme. If they provoked a groan from the audience, the poet acknowledged this as a compliment with a wave of the hand. I can remember the pay-off lines of that lampoon: Und so steigt man immer höher, bis man wird ein Makkabäer! It rhymes badly in German, very badly. My free translation is: ‘So one rises to new heights till one joins the Maccabites! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My tall grandfather Fraenkel (the May bug) seemed to me a very calm and stable person, especially in contrast to his wife. My father told me that as a child he regularly prayed to God to preserve his father, not his mother. He was terrified of being left with only his mother. Grandmother Franziska had neither calmness nor stability. She was a good-looking old lady when I knew her: her slender neck accentuated by a black band. A lorgnette hung from her necklace and keys from her belt. After meals she would lock up sugar bowls and groceries, convinced that her servants were out to rob her. But that 29

SILESIA was the least worrying of her peculiarities. I thought of her as ‘cracked’. I would hear the door of her music room shut with a bang. This would be the prelude to one of two possible sequences: sometimes one would hear her playing the piano with great force and – though I could not judge – virtuosity. My father, who did not find much to admire in his mother, conceded that she played better than any other non-professional he knew. However, at other times that bang of the door would be followed by different sounds, angry conversation. But there was no one else there. She would stomp around the room, arguing. My father said he once braced himself and listened. She was having a bitter dispute with her mother – long dead. The family attributed her mental state to a severe bout of puerperal fever following the birth of her daughter. I never believed this. I thought the madness was familial; after all, her sister Ella Pollock had spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals and there was a brother, Ludwig, who had committed suicide. And my father had eccentricities – far milder than my grandmother’s but enough to frighten me as a child. Would I go mad when I grew older? Franziska antagonized many by her tactlessness and snobbery. Nevertheless, grandfather supported her in all her quarrels, losing old friends as a result. My father was less tolerant. One of his stories concerned her behaviour at a family wedding. Someone, I no longer remember who, was marrying a person from a family Franziska considered socially inferior. She wanted no social relations with these new ‘relatives’. During the celebrations she announced, within earshot of the other family, ‘well, one takes the best piglet out of the sty and then shuts the gate – firmly.’ Well into the 1930s, when the world she had known had collapsed, she complained about some young friend: ‘a lady does not push a pram. One leaves that to domestic servants.’ She laid down that one does not mix socially with people who kept an open shop. Wholesalers were, apparently, not entirely beyond the pale, but people who served behind a counter certainly were. Fortunately, she died before her daughter became a domestic servant in the USA and her son a dry cleaner in Northern Rhodesia. He kept an open shop! She came from a well-to-do family. Her aunt, the infamous poetess Friederike Kempner (‘Know ye not how sore we ache – lying in the grave awake!’) signed herself Rittergutsbesitzerin, which could be translated as Lady of the Manor. Private tutors educated her on the family estate, Droschkau in Silesia, which she eventually inherited. Prussian aristocrats had long had recurring nightmares that the 30

BUT WE WERE GERMANS Jews would eventually buy up their bankrupt estates. The Kempners appear to have done just that. Perhaps the snobbery came with the estate? I have not been able to discover how they made their money. But Franziska’s grandfather, a wine merchant, did marry the daughter of a Viennese banker. Perhaps that was where the money came from. Franziska’s own father had a factory at Görlitz in Silesia that manufactured overcoats. At the age of only 45 he sold out, invested in gilt-edged stock and retired to Berlin – a typical nineteenth-century rentier, but not a Croesus. Grandmother had a reputation for great meanness. My father complained about the presents she brought back from her travels. On one occasion he received an elegant umbrella with an ivory handle, but when he took a closer look he found that the ivory was split. ‘Typical,’ he said, ‘She always buys “seconds”.’ He was less than fair: when it really mattered she behaved generously: shortly before we were to emigrate she made over a considerable sum to my father. It was a major part of what he would have inherited on her death. These funds had to be converted into British sterling at a punitive exchange rate – a special rate for émigrés, namely Jews. The bulk went into the coffers of the Nazis. Even so, it meant that we did not arrive quite penniless in central Africa. Moreover, with me, her grandson, she was never tight-fisted. Whenever we went for walks she bought me large helpings of liquorice. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I come back to Cosel. Life there was pleasant. I remember eating delicious Italian ice cream while watching my parents play tennis. They went swimming in the River Oder – I searched for tadpoles in the shallow parts. Sunday excursions to remote country inns were made on foot, usually for afternoon coffee and cakes. No one we knew owned a car. When I got tired my father carried me on his shoulders. My parents had a large circle of friends: bourgeois officials, lawyers and small industrialists. But apart from them was a ‘high society’, an aristocracy of landowners. Many of them lived in ‘straitened circumstances’. Curiously, in schools their children were not segregated from the hoi polloi as they might have been in Britain. My father had two scions of great aristocratic families among his classmates in his state school. Teachers addressed them as Sie (that is ‘vous’) at an age when other pupils were still du. That brought upon them merciless ragging from their classmates. One was Lippe, or so my father called him. I 31

SILESIA found his full name in the Almanach de Gotha. It was Prince August Friedrich Wilhelm von Lippe-Darmstadt of Drogelwitz. This impressive title did not inhibit a teacher from flinging an essay at the boy’s head, shouting, ‘Lippe! You’ve made a right princely mess of that.’ ‘Lippe, da haben Sie Sich aber wieder mal fürstlich blamiert.’ At Cosel my father, by then the senior taxman, did have some contact with this aristocratic world. ‘They were ever so polite,’ he told me years later. ‘I always regarded that exaggerated politesse of theirs as – somehow – insulting.’ At harvest time he would tour their estates to inspect crops. With him travelled an agricultural expert who would estimate crop yields to help my father evaluate the reliability of tax returns. Every few years a senior official from the ministry in Berlin would join the team. One year my father found himself in harness with an old gentleman who arrived in a Maybach, the German equivalent of a Rolls Royce. On the bonnet flew the flag of the Weimar Republic, red, white and gold. This had been the banner of the failed liberal rising of 1848. The republic had adopted it as the national flag, replacing the black, white and red flag of the Kaisers. The man from the ministry had, undoubtedly, held his post since those ‘good old days’. My father was sure that if there had ever been any chance of bringing back the Kaiser, this man would have been heart and soul in favour. But things aren’t that simple – not if you are a Prussian civil servant circa 1930. I recall what my father told me on those evening walks along unlit streets in central Africa: We came to visit this stately home. A splendid lunch had been laid on for us, or so we gathered: the landowner consulted us on how we wanted our goose cooked; and what wines we preferred. We did our crop inspection in the morning – the old gentleman from Berlin, the agricultural expert and I. The landowner walked around with us. As we came back to the manor house, we came past the Maybach. The driver saluted. On the bonnet flew the flag of the republic. The landowner pointed to it: ‘How limply it hangs there – that sad dishrag.’ My superior stared at him coldly for a moment, then snapped: ‘I will not have you insult the flag of the state to which I have sworn an oath of allegiance.’ He signalled to the driver, we three got into the car and drove off – hungry. And yet I never had any doubt that that man was ‘kaisertreu’ – faithful to the Kaiser and nostalgic for a restoration.

32

BUT WE WERE GERMANS That’s Prussia, or was. One Christmas one of these big landowners sent my father a fat goose. He went to a poultry merchant, had the goose weighed and valued and sent back the value assessed, with polite thanks. That’s Prussia, or was. Some 60 years later Teddy Neumann, the artist of Cosel origin (of whom more later) told me: I never knew anyone more Prussian than your father. Now my own father was a minor customs official, but he was determined to have his three sons get on in the world. He borrowed money and put the three of us through higher education. When we graduated, the three of us took over the repayment of father’s debts. I applied for a tax deduction on my share. Your father took me aside and said: ‘Look, Teddy, this is a grey area. You could be entitled to this. It’s within my responsibility to decide. But, you’re a friend. If I decided in your favour this could be regarded as favouritism. Would you be willing to withdraw your application? I’d be happy to compensate you out of my own pocket.’ I still wonder: was that Prussian integrity or Jewish insecurity? No doubt I carry in my mind a greatly prettified picture of Prussia. I was a child. I echo what I heard from the adults closest to me. There is an anecdote that the same Teddy Neumann told me decades later about a Prussian official who searched his pockets for a stub of a pencil to note down a personal appointment. He would not use the state’s pen and ink on his desk for private purposes. Apocryphal? Probably, but the fact that such a tale gained wide currency does say something about Prussia. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Cosel: a cemetery in heavy autumn mists. Through the grey we could see only one or two rows of crosses immediately ahead. Planted in front of each was a light that flickered in the mist: a little oil lamp or candle. We walked under trees dripping with wet. Eventually we reached the grave of Käthe’s grandparents. Käthe was our cook. I watched her light a little oil lamp we had brought along. It was All Souls Day. It is one of the few memories of Cosel that is my own, not secondhand, passed on by my father. I also remember Martha, my nursemaid, waking me one moonlit night, wrapping me in an eiderdown and 33

SILESIA carrying me out to the balcony to see one of the wonders of the world: a Zeppelin was flying over Cosel. And I remember Käthe leaning her ample bosom out of the window of the kitchen and waving to soldiers marching past. She and Martha would sing to the music of the band and I would join in: ‘When the soldiers come marching through the town, the girls open the doors and windows.’ Wenn die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren. Öffnen die Mädchen die Fenster und die Türen, Hei Warum? Hei darum, Hei bloß weg’n dem tsching-darassa, bum-darassa-bum The refrain imitated the sound of the military band: ‘Tching-dah-rassa boom-dah-rassa-boom.’ I recall little boys marching in the street around the band. I wanted to join them but Martha refused to let me go. They were street urchins, she said. When I’m big, Martha, can I be a street urchin? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My mother went to parties and played tennis and flirted with handsome young men and conspired with Frau Krämser to hide, from Dr Krämser, the ‘Krämserine’s’ flirtations or, even, infidelities. The ‘Krämserine’, looking now at old photographs, was strikingly seductive. I suspect she might have performed similar kindnesses for my attractive mother. There were, after all, admirers like Teddy Neumann, the artist (who painted a fine portrait of her) and his brother Fritz, the architect. Perhaps there were others. These were the 1920s. The military defeat of Germany and the destruction of the old order had brought in a permissive lifestyle, which affected not only high society, but also the bourgeoisie, even the provincial bourgeoisie in Upper Silesia. But Käthe was always there. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ There was, my father told me, a minor mystery about the tax department’s office complex. A man who did not belong to the income tax department occupied one room immediately above his own. A man of military bearing, he would greet my father in the corridor but the two never got into conversation. ‘Don’t ask,’ my father’s predecessor had advised. Once a year a colonel or general in civvies came to Cosel and 34

BUT WE WERE GERMANS always paid a courtesy visit to my father – as if to thank him for his discretion. The mystery man and his duties were never discussed. My father guessed he was there in case of ‘Polish troubles’. Cosel did have a garrison but it was only a few hundred men. Under the Versailles Treaty Germany was allowed to have 100,000 men at arms, no more. But the Silesian border was regarded as unsafe: a few years earlier there had been pitched battles at the Annaberg – Mount St Anne. Upper Silesia was ethnically divided between Poles and Germans. I cannot remember hearing Polish spoken though I did learn a few juicy swear words. They tell me that as a child I spoke German with the harsh accent of the region, which echoed the rolling Rs of the Poles. Upper Silesia is rich in coal and iron ore. The newly reconstituted Polish state was keen to have possession of it. At Versailles, the victorious allies decided on a plebiscite. French, British and Italian troops were sent to keep the peace while the inhabitants were consulted. In the 1921 plebiscite 700,000 ballots were cast for Germany, 480,000 for Poland. The margin might have been narrower but for a mistake in Polish tactics. They had insisted that anyone born in Upper Silesia should be allowed to participate. This turned out to work against them. All over Germany Upper Silesian migrants were traced and persuaded to return for a day or two to cast their votes. Polish organization was greatly inferior, thus confirming the Germans in their prejudices: Polnische Wirtschaft – Polish management – was a phrase that Germans used to describe disorganization and muddle. When the voting figures were published, the Germans argued that Upper Silesia should remain German. But there were districts where a clear majority favoured Poland. What to do? While this was being debated 35,000 Polish ‘insurgents’ invaded, trying to create a fait accompli. Allied troops intervened and some British, French and Italian soldiers lost their lives. So did a number of Poles. The Germans did not take long to respond. Motley bands of irregulars – Freikorps – made up of demobilized officers and soldiers moved into Upper Silesia. As their insignia they adopted an Indian symbol that was to become more familiar in later years – the swastika. Allied troops could do little to prevent pitched battles. At Mount St Anne some 5000 men were involved. The Poles were defeated. Among the German irregulars were men who later rose to prominence among the Nazis. It was they who brought the swastika into the Hitler movement. Eventually, the Allies divided Upper Silesia roughly along ethnic lines – roughly. Considerable minorities remained ‘on the wrong sides’ of the new border and this continued to lead to incidents. It was one such 35

SILESIA incident that started the Second World War. In September 1939 the Nazis faked an attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz, not far from Cosel. They even killed an ‘expendable’ concentration camp inmate and left his body, dressed in Polish uniform, on the site. This ‘Polish outrage’ was given as the excuse for the invasion of Poland. But that was still in the remote future. These ethnic troubles affected Uncle Friedrich more seriously than my father. He was a judge in Upper Silesia. ‘The youngest in the country,’ grandmother Sophie claimed, but she did have a tendency to exaggerate such things. In the last years of the Weimar Republic a difficult case was brought to his court. Some Nazis had murdered a Pole. Friedrich received a message from his superiors in the judiciary suggesting he should withdraw from the case. ‘Why?’ he asked. They hummed and hawed but would not give a straight answer. Friedrich ignored their message. He received a second, similar message from higher up, from the ministry in Berlin: ‘Well, you see,’ they said on the phone, ‘you as a Jew. … The accused are selfconfessed Nazis.’ Friedrich protested that he had sworn an oath to uphold the laws of the republic and to administer them fairly. The fact that he happened to be a Jew would make no difference to his conduct of this case or any other. More pressure was put on him to withdraw and in disgust he resigned as a judge. All this happened two or three years before the Nazis came to power. It had long-term consequences for him. After the fall of Hitler Friedrich had no claim to be regarded as a ‘victim of Nazism’. Others received generous compensation. My father did. Friedrich did not. However, I must admit to some sympathy for the men from the ministry. Such cases were sensitive in the near civil-war situation of the early 1930s. The infamous Potempa murder, two years later, agitated the entire country. A band of five Nazi bullyboys went out to have a bit of fun ‘roughing up’ a communist or two. They took half an hour, despite his mother’s pleading, to beat and trample to death one Konrad Pietzuch. Horrifying details of his injuries were revealed in court: boot kicks had severed his jugular vein. His larynx had been crushed. The five were sentenced to death. The case was not unique but what put Potempa into the headlines was Hitler’s telegram of support for the murderers: ‘I find myself linked to you by the deepest of bonds … your liberation is a matter of honour for us.’ The Nazi Völkischer Beobachter denounced the decree under which the 36

BUT WE WERE GERMANS murderers were sentenced: ‘Man is not equal to man. Deed is not equal to deed. By this decree Hitler’s storm troopers are put on a par with Bolsheviks. But worse … these were Poles. Our men would be equated to subhumans.’ Six months later Hitler became chancellor and the Potempa Five were amnestied. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ In 1931 my father asked to be transferred to Breslau, the provincial capital. He told me later that, as a Jew, with the Nazi movement growing steadily, he felt exposed as the most senior official in a small provincial town. I never asked him whether any particular incident had influenced his decision. Certainly the idyllic, peaceful world of my childhood could not have been quite so trouble-free for him. I do recall childhood distress, but it had nothing to do with the rise of the Nazis. When we moved to Breslau, Käthe would not come with us. She was terrified of being run over by motorcars in that vast city – population 650,000! I wept bitterly. To this day I detest beetroot. I attribute this to having been served beetroot by Käthe when she informed me that she was not coming with me. Martha took me to Glogau by train. I was to stay with my grandparents while our apartment was packed up and the family moved. This was three days after my fifth birthday. Children under five travelled free of charge. When the ticket collector came, Martha, apparently on instructions from my mother, declared I was not yet five. I protested that I had had my fifth birthday three days earlier. I too was a Prussian! The other passengers in the compartment collapsed with laughter. Martha had to pay a fine. She was angry with me. I recall other childhood distress: in ‘Uncle’ Gutfreund’s brewery – I called him uncle although he was no relative – there was a hoist for raising grain to the upper floors. A sparrow was trapped in the hoist shaft. Poor little bird! Various workmen tried to dislodge it but the bird was terrified and remained trapped. In the end Uncle Gutfreund himself, though a portly man in his fifties, climbed up the wooden scaffolding, wrenched away some planks and allowed the bird to escape. His workmen cheered and I gave him a hug. Uncle Gutfreund had a large garden in which he grew asparagus under little mounds. He gave parties and the guests were invited to go out, after a schnapps or two, to cut these asparagus. They were then handed to the cook who served them with the meal. They say there is 37

SILESIA nothing quite like the taste of asparagus freshly cut, but at the age of four I refused to eat them and cried when adults tried to make me do so. Such were the anxieties of my childhood. Not Nazis. Fifty miles from Cosel, across the Polish border, lay the town of Oswiesciem, better known by its German name – Auschwitz.

38

Chapter 3

We became Jews No building was very tall; no avenue excessively wide; no square vast. The Breslau of my childhood was a town on a human scale. Perhaps Käthe had thought it overwhelming, I do not remember it as such. The cafés: my mother would spend relaxed afternoons with friends, gossiping over coffee and cakes with whipped cream. They all wore hats, some with veils. Occasionally I was taken along. The cakes had curious names like ‘love bone’ and ‘bee sting’. The men, at separate tables, hatless, puffed at cigars and read their way through newspapers provided by the establishment. Papers, clamped to wood-and-wire frames, were passed from table to table. I usually demanded a ‘love bone’ and if, after an hour of adult conversation, I became restive my mother would reward good behaviour by ordering me an ice cream piled high with whipped cream. One day a waiter sidled up to my mother: ‘Gnädige Frau’ (gracious lady) ‘may I make so bold as to enquire: could it have been you who were left in Café Grossweiler – I used to work there you know – as a … deposit? That would have been a good few years ago.’ My mother laughed. ‘It was! And I always hoped no one had noticed!’ Yes, as a teenager my mother had had coffee and cakes at Grossweilers with two of her girl friends, but when it came to paying they discovered that none of them had any money. So the other two, who lived nearer, had gone off to look for some, leaving my mother behind as the deposit. The waiter chuckled. ‘But you know, madam, we would have trusted … someone like you. And this little boy, he’s yours? Well, well, how time passes!’ That gemütlich coffee house life came to an abrupt end in 1935 or 1936. Juden unerwünscht – Jews not desired – signs suddenly appeared on the entrances. We heard that brown-shirted bullyboys had marched in and ordered the proprietors to display these signs. In Breslau South some proprietors must have feared bankruptcy as a result. Many of the earlier, 1933, Nazi moves – like the boycott day, which coincided with my first day at school – had seemed like the 39

SILESIA juvenile excesses of a regime that would soon settle down. And, indeed, the following day life appeared to have returned to normal. These new signs on cafés and cinemas, two or three years later, were different. They were meant to stay. So were an increasing number of other edicts, such as the exclusion of Jews from German universities. But weren’t we Germans? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Breslau had endured much history long before those bawling Brown Shirts. At the heart of the city was a cluster of islands in the wide River Oder. An early Slav settlement had grown up facing these islands, where the river was fordable, but in 1241 the town’s own townsfolk had burnt it down. They had been hoping to deny shelter to the advancing Mongol armies of one of Genghis Khan’s satraps. The inhabitants took refuge on the islands. By means of wicked witchcraft the Mongols won a great victory at Wallstadt not far from Breslau. At least, so contemporary records said. The invaders appear to have had a secret weapon, which caused the Silesian cavalry to flee in terror: firework dragons! But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The Mongols withdrew without ever occupying the burnt-out town. The townsfolk returned. The Polish lords now had ambitious plans: they invited craftsmen and traders from the west to settle – Germans. That was the beginning of the Germanization of Silesia. The new settlers built fine steep-roofed houses grouped around two market squares. They built red brick Gothic churches, which their descendants refurbished in colourful baroque. The Oder islands were left to the church: monasteries arose, more churches with tall steeples mirrored in the waters of the river, a cathedral, a bishop’s palace, tithe-barns and – on the mainland – a Jesuit college, which later became a university. Silesia passed from the Polish crown to the Bohemian and later to the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1740 Frederick the Great of Prussia unceremoniously seized the region. Maria Theresa wept, saying she had lost the diadem in her crown. I assume she was referring to the great fertility of Silesia. In the following century Napoleon’s armies overran this part of Europe and he ordered Breslau’s town walls razed. However, stretches of the moat survived, the home of dignified white swans. In the last days of the Nazi regime, when Breslau was encircled and shelled by the Red Army, the besieged population ate the descendants of these swans. But all that was still in the unknowable future when Herr Lerche, our teacher, distributed bits of bread for us to throw to the swans. He had 40

WE BECAME JEWS taken our class on an outing to show us what remained of the old defences. After Napoleon – freed from the constraints of the old city walls – the town spread in various directions. A grand avenue, a lesser Champs Elysées, was pushed south and new roads radiated from it. The avenue came to be named Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, but it underwent many name changes. Germany was an unstable place, even though Germans hankered so desperately after stability. It became Hindenburgstrasse, after the second president of the Weimar Republic. Then the Nazis renamed it Strasse der SA – Street of the Storm Troopers. The local wits, however, said that SA stood for ‘Söhne Abrahams’, the sons of Abraham, because the area was, by then, much favoured by well-to-do Jews. Now, after all things German and all things Jewish have disappeared, the avenue has become Powstancow Slaskich, the Street of the Silesian Insurgents. It commemorates those very warriors whose knavish tricks a mystery man in the office just above my father’s in Cosel had tried to frustrate! In my days Breslau was a German city. The Upper Silesian border region may have had a sizeable Polish population, but in the rest of Silesia German education and centuries of German settlement had virtually eliminated Slav influences. When Silesia was annexed to Poland after 1945 a former socialist speaker of the Reichstag, Paul Löbe – certainly not an ultra-nationalist, he had spent many years in Hitler’s concentration camps – protested: ‘700 years of German culture! Neither a Polish church service nor a Polish school was ever demanded. No Polish newspaper ever appeared, because no one in Breslau could have read it.’ But, to come back to that street of many names, the houses were solidly built, very solidly, faced in stone or in plaster pretending to be stone. Elaborate carved doors opened onto wide carriage drives, which led to mews in the courtyards behind. Ornate balustraded balconies rested heavily on caryatids. These houses were designed to impress, not to delight. In those days before motorcars became a pest, the well to do lived facing major traffic arteries. The occasional clatter of hooves, or the clanging of an electric tram did not disturb. Wellestablished lime trees dispersed the sounds. When we moved to Breslau in 1931 we found an apartment in a more modest street. But Grandfather Goldschmidt, my ‘little grandfather’, lived on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse. The house was set well back from the avenue. It had a longish front garden with a tea pavilion – a sort of gazebo – where I played marbles. Lilacs and magnolias grew in 41

SILESIA the garden. Later road widening schemes truncated that pretty garden and the tea-pavilion had to be pulled down. Grandfather was part owner of that grand house. Each floor, and I think there were five, housed a single five- or six-bedroom apartment intended for a large bourgeois family with many servants. By the time I knew the building the floors had been partitioned, some into two flats. Others remained in single occupation but were divided between residential accommodation and workspaces. The first floor with a great balcony facing the avenue was Grandfather Goldschmidt’s own. The grand rooms facing the avenue were his private quarters: behind were the servants’ quarters. But the apartment extended, L-shaped, to four or more rooms facing the courtyard. They housed grandfather’s legal practice – clerks, scribes and copyists. The floor above was divided similarly between the private residence of a physician, Dr Bach, and his medical practice. The doctor and my grandfather owned that building in partnership. They were friends as well as business associates. They also owned other property in partnership. But there may have been some tension between them. Grandfather related how he had represented Dr Bach in a difficult court case but had lost. The next time they met, Bach had reproached him bitterly. ‘My dear Herr Doktor,’ grandfather replied (or so grandmother told me decades later), ‘if I don’t succeed in one of my lawsuits, my client buttonholes me in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse and complains. But if you, Herr Doktor, fail one of your patients, there’s silence. They’ve buried him in Lohestrasse cemetery!’ As a six-year-old I didn’t much like my little grandfather. He had had a light stroke and suffered from a facial paralysis that must have accounted for what I disliked: his ‘wet’ kiss. Another thing that made me feel uncomfortable about him was watching him inject himself. He had severe diabetes and had to inject insulin twice a day. But he did know how to amuse his grandson – his first and, so far as he ever knew, his only one. His meticulous way of combing his hair made me laugh. He was totally bald. Even the remaining outer fringe had been shaved off, as was the custom among Germans at that time. See the wicked caricatures by Grosz! Nevertheless he brushed and combed this shiny pate several times a day. When I asked him why, he pretended to be offended: ‘but can’t you see this one hair? It gets ever so untidy!’ Best of all, I enjoyed the extra birthday he organized for me. We were on holiday at the little spa resort of Reinerz. We were staying at a 42

WE BECAME JEWS hotel that belonged to one of his old clients from Ostrowo, a Gentile. Both had migrated after the First World War when the Poznan region became part of the re-created state of Poland. Before making his booking grandfather had written to make sure that the hotel did not display a ‘Jews not welcome’ sign. His old friend Dohme assured him that no hotel he owned would ever display such a sign. ‘Good fellow,’ said grandfather. ‘But I wonder how long he’ll be able to hold out.’ I was aged between seven and eight and one day, shortly before we travelled to Reinerz, I complained that it was terrible to have to wait 12 long months between birthdays. ‘The child is absolutely right,’ said grandfather. ‘Life is short.’ Little did he know how short! ‘One must celebrate whenever opportunities arise.’ So he organized a seven-and-a-halfth birthday for me. He ordered those members of the family who were accompanying him to Reinerz to give me presents. At Reinerz he ordered a cake with seven long candles and one short one. Best of all, he announced that, from now on my halfbirthdays would be celebrated every May. Alas, I only benefited his innovation once. A few days later, still at Reinerz, he had a second stroke. I was sent out to play while he lay struggling with death. Once my mother called from the balcony and told me to ask the hotel management for some hot water. I carried a jug up to his room and saw him propped up in bed with a chair supporting his back and a doctor by his side. I returned to my game of torturing a green caterpillar. Then I stopped and prayed: ‘Dear God, if I stop teasing this little caterpillar … please, will you let Opa live?’ God did not accept my bargain. Not long after, I have been told, Dr Kuhn picked up grandfather’s travelling cap and put it on his head. ‘What are you doing with my husband’s hat?’ shrieked my overwrought grandmother. ‘I am saying Kaddish.’ She must have looked blank. Could it really be that she did not understand? The doctor found it necessary to explain: ‘I am saying the Hebrew prayer for the dead.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ If I survive as the repository of family anecdotes – and perhaps of events that have more significance than mere family anecdotes – this is due to circumstances beyond my control, circumstances I would have avoided if only I had known how. When I was a student in Johannesburg, South Africa, grandmother Sophie Goldschmidt, who survived her husband by 40 years, insisted 43

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2. God did not accept my bargain. ‘Little grandfather’ died three days after this photo was taken.

that I dine with her every Wednesday evening. The meal was almost always the same – Wiener schnitzel, over-cooked, often hard as leather. Grandmother could bake delicious cakes and biscuits, but she was a disaster with other food. On those interminable Wednesday evenings she related family anecdotes – the same ones again and again. Her monologue always started with a denunciation of her son44

WE BECAME JEWS in-law, my dearly loved Uncle Friedrich. He had once written a poem lampooning her cooking skills: ‘The Roulade Week’. At that stage they all lived together and she took care of the cooking. She had served roulades on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday. Grandmother had discovered the wicked lampoon while going through Friedrich’s writing desk. When she confronted him, he said some harsh things about people who snooped around in other people’s private papers. There followed a family rift. I heard her denunciation of Friedrich’s villainy every Wednesday, but she never admitted how she had come to discover his lampoon. I protected myself against boredom by nodding and saying ‘really?’ from time to time. This was to hide that I was drafting, in my mind, essays I was required to present to my tutors the following week. However, when grandmother had finished her denunciation of Friedrich, she turned to other family stories. Occasionally I found them interesting enough to stop thinking about Webster, who was much possessed by death, or Donne, with whom I had not yet quite done. As with my father’s stories, they have become part of me. I am almost convinced I was in the room myself when Dr Kuhn seized my grandfather’s travelling cap. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Grandfather Martin Goldschmidt, my little grandfather, was very different from the tall grandfather Fraenkel who had served with the Imperial Guards. Martin was very short – only five foot something – but topped by an enormous head. He had been the son and grandson of small printer/publishers in Krotoschin, not far from Posen (Poznan) in what was then Prussian Poland. As a poor student he had lived in the household of his uncle, the historian Heinrich Graetz – author of the standard eleven-volume History of the Jews. Grandmother claimed that the last volume of the history had been dictated to her husband. However, that was another instance of her ‘telling it with advantages’. I have checked the dates: grandfather was only eight years old when the last volume of that history was published! But it is quite likely that some later Graetz writings were indeed dictated to him. ‘Alles zusammengeklaut’ was the nephew’s comment. ‘All pinched from others’ – never an original thought. And that is a remark grandmother is unlikely to have invented. Grandfather decided to escape, but not due to disenchantment with the famous historian’s scholarship. More decisive was Marie Graetz’s 45

SILESIA cooking. Marie, his own mother’s sister, was fiercely jealous of old man Graetz’s admiration for his nephew’s intellect. This contrasted with his dismissive attitude to his own sons by Marie. ‘She fed your grandfather on soup meat, nothing but boiled-out soup meat while her own children got the best.’ Grandfather went to see another of his uncles, a businessman. ‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘you know that I’m going to do well as a lawyer. I’ve got a Koeppel, a head on my shoulders. Lend me some money so that I can live in tolerable comfort while I finish my studies. I’m sick to death of soup meat.’ The uncle did. Grandmother repeated this story even more frequently than many others. The reason, I suspect, had to do with its aftermath. This still rankled half a century later: a few weeks after their marriage, grandfather took grandmother’s dowry (intended, she thought, to set the two of them up in modest bourgeois comfort) and repaid his debt to the uncle in one single instalment. Of course grandfather’s self-confident expectations were justified: he became a very successful lawyer, first in the provincial town of Ostrowo (Ostrow Wielkopolski) and later, in Breslau. He served on the executive of the Association of German Lawyers and published a number of legal texts. But this matter of the dowry rankled. In 1918 the Polish state was reborn and citizens of the ‘Provinz Posen’ had to decide their future nationality. Grandfather was offered a judgeship (at least, so said grandmother) if he would ‘opt’ for Poland. He declined. He could not speak Polish and doubted he could ever learn it sufficiently well. But far more important was that he felt 100 per cent German. The Poles interned him but this seems to have been a very gentlemanly affair. He could receive visitors and grandmother sent in his diabetic diet meals every day. After a few weeks he was released and the family migrated to Breslau, to Germany proper, as it was thought of at that time. So at the age of 48 he had to start building up a second legal practice. If grandfather Martin was somewhat aggressive and pushy as a young man – and men of very short stature often are – there was no trace of this left in later years. He had a quiet, scholarly manner, punctuated by flashes of wit. His library consisted largely of Latin and Greek classics in translation, though they say his Latin was good. He swapped Latin quips with his best friend, Herr Rudolf, a judge. Again, I have to rely on grandmother Sophie’s Wednesday evening recollections and these were handicapped by her lack of Latin. One she did, however, remember: one Sunday lunchtime the maid, bringing an oxtongue to the table, stumbled. The tongue slipped off the serving dish 46

WE BECAME JEWS and rolled onto a visitor’s lap. ‘Lapsus linguae’, grandfather apologized, ‘a mere slip of the tongue’. Grandfather appeared to be the wealthiest member of the family but he did not live ostentatiously. Grandmother reported later that he had an extravagant streak. In the good old days he often bought jewellery for her or, after concluding some major court case, a Persian carpet. He also bought fine porcelain. All his purchases were, however, kept unostentatiously within the home. They were part of ‘Wohnkultur’, of civilized living. Grandmother grumbled that he should rather have invested in gilt-edged securities. His rejoinder – as related on those Wednesday evenings – was in folksy dialectal German: ‘Un’ wenn der Topp aba a Loch hat?’ And what if the pot has a leak? Clothes, food, holidays, transport were quite as modest in grandfather’s establishment as in that of my own parents who lived on a civil servant’s salary in an unfashionable part of the town. Perhaps the one difference was in his library: grandfather’s books were usually bought unbound. He then had them bound in leather. His own engraved ex-libris was mounted in the cover. But he never owned a car. None of our friends or acquaintances did, not even Konsul Smoschewer, who lived in a large villa set in a small park. People travelled by tram. My father took the tram to his office every day. Grandfather Goldschmidt travelled to the law courts by tram. For Sunday excursions to Zobten, a mountain some 20 or so miles from Breslau, one took the train. I walked to school. Later, aged ten or eleven, I was given a bicycle. There was little traffic so this was considered safe enough. Taxis were a rare extravagance. When my other grandfather – the tall one – was taken to hospital for a hernia operation, I was allowed to accompany him in a taxi. That was a very rare treat! Holidays were modest: once or even twice a year we went to a boarding house, usually the same one, in the Riesengebirge, the mountain range that divides Silesia from Bohemia. The boarding house sent a horse drawn carriage to wait for us at the station. Porters loaded our suitcases. I was allowed to sit in front with the coachman. In winter we skied. In summer we went on long hikes to mountain inns. The living standard was comfortable but modest, except for porcelain – Meissen, KPM, Bavaria AG and so on. This passion dates back to the eighteenth century when the dirigiste German states took the initiative to establish manufactories. Among enterprises they set up were porcelain ones. What they produced was good, but the public 47

SILESIA would not buy. Only Sèvres or Limoges had prestige. French was spoken at German courts. Hadn’t Frederick the Great said that German was a language fit only for horses and stable lads? He should not have been surprised that the Prussian porcelain factory (which the king himself owned) did not catch on. So he ordained that well-to-do Jews would have to buy a complete dining set from the Königliche Porzellanmanufaktur before they could get permission to marry. Only Jews could be coerced in this way! As a consequence most of the oldest, finest and most valuable German porcelain came to be in the hands of Jewish families, heirlooms passed from generation to generation. In the eighteenth century my ancestors did not belong to the wealthy that could have been pressed into buying expensive porcelain. But porcelain became a symbol of status among German Jews. Later generations, as they became wealthier, continued to buy and to collect porcelain long after the compulsion had ceased. In my time, there was a movement described, jocularly, as ‘the Jewish gesture’. A visitor not certain of the provenance of his host’s china would raise his coffee cup to his lips and then, surreptitiously, still a little higher until he could cast a quick glance at the marks on the underside. Of course, no really well bred visitor would do any such thing. But there were many not quite so well bred. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The death of my tall grandfather Fraenkel, two years after Goldschmidt, remains very clear in my mind. I do not know whether men today would know how to die as he did. He had been a good storyteller. They were simple cops-and-robbers stories he told his two grandsons, about brigands in the Abruzzi region of Italy. I think he must have read a book about that region and on that basis he improvised his adventure stories. He would sit in his armchair with Cousin Klaus and myself at his feet on a Persian rug. Through the window behind him I could see the glorious cherry tree. Klaus would demand that the villains should win. I was more conformist and wanted the goodies to win. Grandfather, very even-handed, devised one story to please Klaus, the following one to please me. Some time in the year 1936 he came back from a vacation and in response to his grandsons’ demands he said: ‘I have no more stories.’ We were disappointed. He appeared tired. He must have known that he was terminally ill. ‘Cancer of old age’ had been diagnosed – a form of leukaemia, I suspect. A few weeks later he took to his bed. 48

WE BECAME JEWS Grandmother insisted that Klaus and I move silently around the apartment, which we found difficult. Occasionally I was taken in to see him and he held out his large hand with its brown spots of age. One afternoon my father ushered me into the sickroom. I do not know whether he had arranged what followed or whether grandfather had asked for me. With some help from my father, he hoisted himself up in bed, then placed his large emaciated hands upon my head and gave me his blessing. We Fraenkels are cohanim – members of the priestly caste, descended through the male line from Aaron the high priest. Grandfather pronounced the biblical priests’ blessing: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you … and give you peace.’ Then he added ‘Preserve the faith. Be a good Jew – upright, honest and just in all your dealings with your fellow men.’ Then my father helped him to lie down again and I was ushered out. He died the day after. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My father’s income as a civil servant was modest and yet, in Cosel, we had kept two full-time living-in maids. Later, in Breslau, when I no longer needed a nurse, there was only one – Frieda. Why did we employ servants? Running a household in the 1930s was labour intensive: shopping had to be done daily. We did not have a refrigerator. We did have an ice chest and in summer a man in a leather apron carried up a block of ice to our flat every second or third day. Early each morning Frieda went down to the baker’s to fetch fresh rolls for our breakfast – deliciously smelling warm rolls with caraway seeds. Later she would take me, with my mother’s shopping list, to do the round of the grocer, greengrocer, dairyman, butcher and fishmonger, as required. I liked going with her. The butcher would give me a slice of salami, the dairyman a slice of Edam, the greengrocer a radish or two. Shopping took time. Virtually nothing was prepackaged. Our grocer kept rice in sacks and sauerkraut in barrels; purchases were weighed out for the customer. The dairyman ladled out milk into a billycan, which I was allowed to carry. Even sweets, which I bought with my pocket money, were counted out. A joke that greatly amused Cousin Klaus and me, at the age of about eight, illustrates this: we even turned it into a sketch, which we compelled our assembled families to watch on the occasion of those dreary Sunday lunch get-togethers. Three little boys queue up in a sweet shop. ‘What can I do for you, 49

SILESIA young man?’ asks the shopkeeper. ‘Ten pfennigs worth of gobstoppers, please sir.’ The shopkeeper gets out his ladder, climbs up to the top shelf, brings down a jar of gobstoppers and counts out ten pfennigs’ worth. He closes the jar, climbs up the ladder, replaces it, comes down again, collects his ten pfennigs and hands over the sweets in a paper bag improvised from a sheet of newspaper. ‘And you, my lad?’ he says to the second. ‘I’d also like ten pfennigs worth of gobstoppers, sir.’ The shopkeeper curses under his breath and repeats the whole operation. He is about to carry the jar back up the ladder, but thinks better of it and turns to the third: ‘And you, boy, do you want the same thing?’ ‘No, sir.’ The jar is duly replaced, the shopkeeper climbs down and asks: ‘So what is it you want, boy?’ ‘Five pfennigs worth of gobstoppers, please, sir.’ Labour was cheap. Maids received board and lodging and a mere 20 or 30 marks a month. Grandmother Sophie told me that she had once asked one of her maids what had made her seek work in town. She had replied: ‘here, Madam, I get meat most days of the week. In my home village, only on feast days.’ Our first Breslau apartment was large and old-fashioned. We had no central heating. Each room had a tiled stove. In winter the concierge brought up kindling wood and pressed brown-coal ‘briquettes’ from the cellar. Fires had to be topped up several times a day throughout the winter. When Frieda was off duty, my father would do this. Late each afternoon my father walked to the barber around the corner to be shaved. The barber’s shop was a centre of gossip. Perhaps my father should have listened more attentively. One day, when my father was the only customer (I was with him, paging through picture magazines) the barber said to him in a lowered voice: ‘Herr Regierungsrat, if I were Jewish, I’d get out. I’d emigrate! Why? Well, you see, my brother-inlaw is in the SS. And what I hear from that fellow.’ And he shook his head. But my father would have none of this. Late in 1935 Frieda was forced to leave us. The Nuremberg edicts forbade non-Jewish women under the age of 45 to work in households that included a Jewish male. This was to prevent Rassenschande – a Nazi neologism not easy to translate: race dishonour? Race rape? Soiling the Germanic race? It was meant to protect innocent, virginal blonde Aryan country maidens from the lascivious embraces of swarthy, hook-nosed lecherous Jews. Neither Frieda nor my father conformed to either stereotype. We had been lucky with Frieda: other Jewish employers had to guard their tongues in case their maids 50

WE BECAME JEWS denounced them to the Gestapo for some incautious remark. Frieda, however, detested the Nazis. Her lover was languishing in a concentration camp. His crime, she told us, was that he had belonged to the Social Democratic Party’s rowing club. (Political parties in the Weimar Republic maintained elaborate social and sporting clubs.) Perhaps he had been more involved politically than she knew, or more than she was willing to tell us. I remember accompanying her down the stairs when we had to part. She was holding my hand and weeping. When she kissed me goodbye, her tears wet my face. I didn’t like that. It reminded me of my little grandfather’s wet kiss. Not long after we moved to a smaller, modern, more easily managed apartment. This was in a street radiating from the KaiserWilhelm-Strasse – in the area popular among well-to-do Jews. It had central heating, parquet floors, double glazing and running hot water. We acquired our first refrigerator and engaged Frau Klose as our parttime cleaner and cook. She was over 50 and the Nuremberg edicts considered older women less likely to excite lascivious Jewish males. She was tall, bony and decidedly unseductive – a God fearing woman, childless and a ‘character’. She became a staunch ally in difficult times. She was married to a master carpenter. From time to time she took me to meet him. I remember Herr Klose showing me his ‘masterpiece’, the proof piece an apprentice had to produce to qualify as a master. It was a miniature spiral staircase, perhaps two-foot-six in height. Each tiny balustrade had been turned on a lathe. Each tread of the stairs had been inlaid with marquetry. Had I been, then, the DIY man I became in later years, I would have found the skill involved awe inspiring. Thereafter he showed me his father’s masterpiece. His family had been carpenters for several generations. On a pedestal, again decorated with elaborate inlaid marquetry, stood a stag at bay. ‘But that’s not carpentry,’ I said, well primed by the art history lectures of Frau Dr Aschheim. ‘That’s sculpture!’ Klose laughed. ‘Such things were expected from a carpenter in those days. Nowadays?’ He shrugged his shoulder. ‘I’m making wooden benches for third class railway carriages.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My parents took short holidays across the Czech border in Marienbad (Marianske Lazne). This was within the Sudetenland, namely the predominantly German-speaking border area, but over there no café displayed anti-Semitic signs. There was a Sudeten Nazi party but at the 51

SILESIA same time German-speaking social democrats and communists operated freely. Many German political exiles found refuge in the region, only a few miles beyond the German border. I remember my father pointing out to me a portly gentleman smoking on a bench outside a hotel near ours: ‘that’s Braun, the former socialist prime minister of Prussia.’ Years later I learnt that this man had quietly accepted his dismissal by a government that paved the way for the Nazis – that of the rightwing conservative von Papen. The dismissal was unconstitutional. ‘But,’ he explained later, ‘resistance would have meant bloodshed.’ Braun had at his command a large paramilitary police force – as large as the German army. He could have had the federal government arrested and, perhaps, stopped the slide towards the Nazi takeover. Of course, such an action would also have been unconstitutional. He might have run the risk of civil war. Braun, however, contented himself with issuing a statement to say that he was yielding to force – that portly gentleman smoking peacefully on a bench outside a hotel in Marienbad. In Marienbad one took the waters from a dozen or more different springs – some hot, some warm, some cool. Each had its own special curative properties, or so they claimed. One could also wallow in mud baths. My mother did. My father’s interests were different: There were German-language lending libraries that specialized in books banned within Germany. Father read avidly. On two of these summer vacations I was sent as a day boarder to a Kinderheim, a colonie de vacances. Attractive young women in their twenties acted as our group leaders. They must have been German communist émigrés or Sudeten-Germans with communist sympathies. At siesta time we would relax in deck chairs in the sun while they read to us from books unlike any I had come across before. These were children’s books published in the Soviet Union, German translations from the Russian. I remember a tale of a boy who loses his parents in the turbulence of the revolution. After many exciting adventures dodging despicable counter-revolutionaries, he finds his father, tall on horseback, riding with a crack Bolshevik regiment. Years later I learnt that, in the Stalin years, talented Soviet writers took to writing for children, which was safer than writing for adults. To me these stories were more exciting than books I read on the German side of the border. I remember my annoyance when I was taken back home before our pretty reader reached the end of a book about a Soviet child inventor. 52

WE BECAME JEWS In Czechoslovakia, at least in German-speaking Sudetenland, it was advisable to be cautious. When my father borrowed ‘forbidden’ books, he wrapped them in brown paper. One day the owner of our boarding house, a Sudeten German, asked me what my parents thought of developments ‘over there’. Aged about ten, I was sufficiently clued up to say that unemployment was coming down; motorways were being built; things were looking up. We had one faraway holiday – in San Martino in the Dolomites. I must have been eight or nine. Perfumed Italian ladies made a tremendous fuss of me, picking me up in the hotel lounge and kissing me. Why? Because I was blond! I have, alas, never been so successful with women since! I fell in love with a little dark-haired girl – she must have been three or four – and she with me. She demanded that I carry her around the village piggyback and I was delighted to oblige. But Italy was fascist and was moving steadily closer to Nazi Germany. One afternoon an itinerant entertainer arrived – a tightrope walker cum singer cum comedian. He balanced on a tightrope stretched between our hotel and the building opposite. We applauded. Then he performed a comic sketch. He threw a cloak over his shoulders, indicated by gesture that he had a beard, and started to sing a song about the Negusa Nagast, the king of kings Haile Selassie, whom I hero worshipped. Our comedian mimed the emperor shivering with terror at the coming of the Italians and then running away ignominiously in the manner of Groucho Marx. I was furious. Ever since Herr Lerche, my primary school teacher, had denounced the wickedness of Italian aggression, I had identified with the darkskinned underdogs. I sincerely hoped that the Itis would be soundly licked as they had been at Adwa in 1896. I was very familiar with this history. Among my favourite reading was From Pole to Pole by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, and books for children about exploration and adventure, mainly in Africa and Asia. Livingstone, Stanley, Mungo Park and Schweinfurth (little known in the English-speaking world) were familiar names to me. But the chapters on Abyssinia, as we called it, were my favourites. Later some perceptive adult, perhaps Teddy Neumann, gave me a book that became one of my favourites, a book about a boy travelling around Ethiopia. The day after the comedian’s performance, an Italian boy from our hotel re-enacted the Negus’s flight in the little ravine where he and I sometimes played. I used my few words of Italian to announce that I was an Abyssinian Ras and advanced towards him with a stick raised. 53

SILESIA He escaped across the little stream at the bottom of the ravine, picked up a stone and threw it at me. He missed. ‘Italia!’ he shouted and threw another stone. ‘Abyssinia!’ I shouted and launched one single stone. To my utter surprise it hit him straight on the forehead. He fled, bawling. Later that evening his parents spoke to mine in the hotel dining room. They said their son was an asthmatic and my outrageous behaviour had brought on an attack. I was reprimanded, but not contrite. That was one battle the Itis did not win! And anyway, it was he who started throwing stones. Honest, it was! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ It must have been around that time that my father joined the ranks of the unemployed. He had remained in office longer than most: until 31 December 1935, that is for three years after the Nazi ‘seizure of power’. Most Jews in the civil service, the judiciary and the universities were dismissed in 1933. But the aged president, Fieldmarshal von Hindenburg, had intervened. The honour of the German army was at stake! He demanded that Jews who had fought in the trenches and the orphans of Jewish war dead be exempted from Hitler’s edict. Hitler had to give way. These documents did not become public knowledge until after the fall of Hitler. I only came upon them recently. To the end of his life my father believed he had been kept in office because of his record of impeccable Prussian integrity. Nazi propaganda claimed that in the First World War Jews had always wangled themselves cushy jobs behind the lines. In fact, the RJF, a Jewish ex-servicemen’s organization, published statistics that showed that the percentage of German Jews who died in the First World War was precisely the same as for ‘the rest of the social and economic strata from which they came’. I have wondered about that phrasing. I suppose it means that peasant lads were slaughtered in even greater numbers because they were less likely to be used as clerks or medicos. However, truth to tell, my father’s war record was not glorious and even now I am a little reluctant to relate it. He was called up in 1914. The recruiting officers in Glogau knew grandfather and said: ‘But of course, you’ll be wanting to serve in your old man’s regiment, won’t you?’ My father agreed readily. ‘I was very young and very naïve,’ he told me years later. The ‘May bugs’ were, after all, probably the most prestigious regiment in Prussia. Their gala uniform was very glamorous. No doubt the girls … 54

WE BECAME JEWS Father was duly sent off to Berlin to join the Garde-Füselier Regiment. But he did not have the broad peasant physique of his own father. The regiment’s initial training was probably the toughest of any German regiment at that time. They would start out on route marches at 4.30 in the morning, laden with a rifle, ammunition and a knapsack full of bricks. They did strenuous exercises all day, attacking imaginary enemy positions crawling on elbows and knees. As dusk approached they were marched back to their barracks. By then our tongues were hanging out and caked with dust. Our sergeants ordered ‘Sing!’ The best we could do was to produce a feeble croak. Bed – that’s all we could think of. We didn’t even want food. But about a kilometre from the camp, there was a hill. Just as we drew level with it they bawled out: ‘Halt. Left turn! Down. Up that hill – as under enemy fire.’ So up we crawled on elbows and knees with the sergeants whacking anyone whose backside protruded too high, then down the hill in a pretend bayonet charge. Finally we were lined up for return to camp. We were a sorry sight. Then, as we approached the flag post the sergeant bawled ‘Paradeschritt’ – the goose step! If you’ve never tried it, you just don’t know how exhausting that goose step is. Well, we did it. But even then the Schweinehunde wouldn’t let us off. ‘Atten–tion!’ ‘At ease!’ An officer jawed us. ‘So you think you’re washed out? Finished? Exhausted? You do?’ We groaned our assent. ‘Well, if you were now told that your own child was desperately ill and the nearest doctor was miles away, you’d find the strength to go and fetch him. Yes, you would. You’d run, every single one of you. So get this into your damned thick skulls: the mind can conquer the body.’ Six weeks of this training brought my father to the point of collapse. They were allowed one Sunday off. Father went to see an uncle, a doctor who ran a private hospital in Berlin. The uncle was shocked by his state and gave him an examination. ‘Do you realize,’ he said, ‘that your left leg is thinner than your right?’ No, no one had ever noticed it before. ‘Now, if you were to develop a limp … on the left.’ My father developed a limp. But it was not that alone that got him out of the Imperial Guards. One day the recruits were lined up, naked, for a Wassermann test for syphilis. Exhaustion combined 55

SILESIA with the sight of a syringe filling with his own blood caused my father to keel over. When he came round he heard the doctor saying: ‘hadn’t you noticed? He’s been limping. Look at that left leg. This man is really not fit enough for a regiment such as this.’ Father was discharged and sent home. He found it embarrassing to walk around Glogau in civilian clothes. He worked quietly in his father’s legal practice. The May bugs went on to Verdun where their attacks – charge after charge – were mowed down by French machine guns under the command of one General Pétain. Two-thirds of the regiment, or so my father claimed, lost their lives charging French trenches. After nine months back in Glogau my father was called up again. This time he was sent to an ordinary artillery regiment. He did not come under fire until late in the war. In the last year he did, however, see action. He was even promoted to sergeant because he was numerate and could calculate projectile paths and direct artillery fire. ‘I used to watch British troops in their khaki uniforms through my binoculars. If anyone had told me that one day I would be drycleaning such uniforms …’ As a child I kept demanding to hear stories of his heroism. ‘Peter,’ he repeated, ‘If I had been a hero, you would never have been born.’ There was, however, one single story of his that did have my childish approval: it was somewhere in Flanders. A general came on a tour of inspection. My father walked behind him, carrying the man’s greatcoat turned inside out. The coat was lined in bright scarlet. Suddenly a British plane appeared and swooped to machine-gun the German positions. My father, no doubt, was sorely tempted to scuttle to an underground bunker, but – no – he clenched his teeth and continued walking upright. It took the general a moment to realize what was happening. ‘Sergeant!’ he bawled, ‘there is no need to provoke enemy fire! Turn that bloody coat.’ Then the general dashed underground, followed in slow, dignified steps by my father. At least, so he told his demanding son. Among old photographs I have found one that puzzles me: my father is being hoisted onto the shoulders of soldiers – apparently his gun crew – in a sort of Roman triumph. It is unlikely to have been a celebration of his military prowess. However, he did once tell me he had been popular with his men because he spoke some French. It was enough to negotiate with Belgian peasants for chickens to supplement their meagre rations. Perhaps it was a chicken dinner that was being celebrated. Yet, my dad was decorated for bravery! Not, however, for the 56

WE BECAME JEWS

3. Celebrating Sergeant Fraenkel’s military prowess? Unlikely. Probably he had secured a chicken dinner for his gun crew.

episode of the red coat. Years after the war my father found it an embarrassment that he had no military decoration to wear at lawyers’ functions. And what if he were to get married? He might have to march down the aisle without a single ribbon! There is, or was, a German term for this: ‘Knopflochpanik’ – buttonhole panic. It must have been a widespread cause of embarrassment. My father wrote to his former commanding officer and by return received a carbon copy of the colonel’s recommendation for the Iron Cross class II for heroism under enemy fire. Twice before, said the letter, Fraenkel had been recommended for this award but HQ had found that others in the regiment had been longer in the trenches and had to be seen to first. The well-deserved award had been postponed. It was his due. No Kaiser pinned it on Dad’s chest. The Iron Cross arrived by registered post. But when my parents married my father could march down the aisle with a black-and-white ribbon in his buttonhole – end of panic. That is not the end of the story: a decade later came the Nazi takeover. This was followed by mass dismissal of Jews from public service. To be exempted (in view of von Hindenburg’s confidential 57

SILESIA intervention) my father had to prove that he had fought in the frontline. Again he wrote to his colonel. The letter that came back caused my father to gasp: ‘At the battle of the Marne Corporal Fraenkel, as he then was, stood in a forward position in charge of a Scherenfernrohr’ – one of those periscope binoculars used to peek over the tops of trenches while keeping one’s head down. ‘Fraenkel remained at this post, fieldtelephone in hand, after the forward trenches had been evacuated following heavy French pressure. Calmly and skilfully the corporal directed the aim of the artillery batteries standing behind the lines. His heroism in remaining at his post under sharp enemy fire made a difficult tactical withdrawal possible and saved many German lives.’ ‘Splendid,’ said my father, ‘only one inaccuracy: I was never at the Marne!’ The letter – and von Hindenburg’s intervention – saved his job and he continued in office longer than most Jews. At one stage he claimed that he was one of only two Jews left in the senior ranks of the Prussian civil service. When he was eventually turfed out it was not on a reduced pension but on full salary. Whether the colonel had confused my father with another hero or whether he was himself being heroically anti-Nazi, my father never discovered. However, the advantageous financial terms of his retirement might have been the death of us. For a long time my father saw no reason to emigrate despite pressure from my mother. I think he enjoyed idleness. He read. He played the violin. He joined an amateur orchestra. He studied English. Yes, English might come in useful one day, one could never know. But he resolutely refused to leave Germany. ‘If things don’t get any better, we’ll send the child abroad for his studies,’ he said. ‘As for me? No one will touch me.’ My mother’s nagging that we should emigrate was dismissed by other members of the family as ‘typical of Margot’s pessimism’ or even of ‘hysteria’. Without Margot’s so-called ‘hysteria’ I may well not have survived. My sons would not have been born. Their descendants owe their existence – at least in part – to Margot’s ‘hysteria’. In 1936 my mother took a trip to South Africa to visit her sister and brother-in-law who had emigrated as early as 1933. Uncle Friedrich, a lawyer, had been prevented from working under that 1933 Nazi edict, which banned all those who had not been frontline soldiers. Friedrich was too young to have served in the army. He was also in some danger as a prominent social democrat and had been assaulted and thrown out of the law courts by Nazi thugs. 58

WE BECAME JEWS During my mother’s absence my father arranged to take lunch at his own mother’s flat, presumably for company. Our cleaning lady could have cooked for him. Perhaps he might even have managed to prepare a simple meal for himself! After some days he noticed a man standing at a window in the block of flats opposite his mother’s who seemed to be peering at him through binoculars. The next day he spotted him there again. He was puzzled and a little perturbed. A few days later a Gestapo official came to see my grandmother. Someone had reported strange goings-on. ‘Who is the man living in your apartment?’ Grandmother explained that her son did not live with her but only came for lunch while his own wife was abroad. ‘But you have an Aryan maid? And she’s under 45, isn’t she? Under the laws to protect German blood from pollution this could constitute a criminal offence.’ No charges were ever laid, but from that day on my father ceased going to his mother’s for lunch. Some 35 years later, when I returned to Breslau/Wroclaw, I discovered that the house from which the snooper had pointed his binoculars had gone. Moreover, the entire row of houses on the other side of the street had vanished. Not one single building remained. They must have been damaged beyond repair in the battle for Breslau. Divine justice can be rough. On the boat, returning from South Africa, my mother had made friends with an elderly Afrikaner who spoke good German, a Mr van Woudenbergh. He was a lawyer and president of the South African Farmers’ Association, a personal friend of General Smuts and a vocal and active anti-Nazi. He offered to help my parents to emigrate. My mother explained her husband’s reluctance. Van Woudenbergh suggested she should at least send me, her son, abroad. He and his wife would act as my foster parents until my parents decided to emigrate. He was convinced they would have to do so eventually. My parents did not accept his offer. I have often wondered what kind of person I might have become if I had grown up in South Africa, in the household of a wealthy member of the Afrikaner establishment. After her return my mother again pleaded with my father that we should emigrate. There were rows, which distressed me. I sided with my mother. The idea of new lands with black or red people excited me. It took another two years before my father finally gave way. But that was not until November 1938, after Kristallnacht, after he had seen a synagogue ablaze and a drunken woman dancing a celebratory jig in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse. 59

SILESIA I have often been asked how someone as highly-strung as my mother could have allowed – no, persuaded – my father to take me into that turbulent city the morning after Kristallnacht. Had she no fears for her only child? What she said that morning was: ‘suppose they stop you in the street to check identity papers? They’ll arrest you. How will I ever know what’s happened or where they’ve taken you? Take the boy with you. He can come back and report.’ She herself felt she could not accompany him because she looked recognizably Jewish, which might have increased his danger. At the age of 12 (before I grew a nose) I did not. She must have believed we lived in a country where no one would harm a child. I, too, cannot recall that I had any fears for my own safety – only for my father’s. After walking around the city centre we did not go back to our apartment. We had arranged to meet my mother at Aunt Hannah’s, my father’s sister. Hannah Markiewitz’s husband had died the previous year. We assumed this would be on the records and the storm troopers would not come to her place. We overrated German efficiency. They did come, but a day or two later. After dark, having spent an anxious day with Hannah, we made our way back to our own apartment. I was sent ahead to scout around for checkpoints and felt very important to have been entrusted with such a duty. My father and mother followed. There were no checkpoints that evening. They were only set up the following day. After that my father remained indoors. Frau Klose, our cleaning lady, only worked mornings, but when we came back that evening she was waiting for us. She had stayed to guard our property and to tell us how she had outfaced ‘that rabble’. Storm troopers had come for my father a short while after we had left. Frau Klose re-enacted the scene with relish: ‘Fraenkel, Hans Moritz?’ they had bawled. ‘I regret Herr Regierungsrat is not at home.’ ‘What the hell – Herr Regierungsrat!’ (literally Mr government councillor). ‘We want the Jew Fraenkel.’ They had pushed their way in, searched the cupboards and even looked under the beds. Finally, they opened my father’s violin case. ‘Also so klein ist der Herr Regierungsrat aber nicht,’ she told them. ‘No, Herr government councillor is not that little!’ We laughed. The next few days of waiting were tense and agonizing, but Frau Klose sensed that laughter was therapeutic and reenacted the scene several times, legs astride, arms akimbo: ‘No, he’s not that little.’ Would they come back for him? My mother packed a small 60

WE BECAME JEWS suitcase: a change of shirt and underclothes, a jumper, Hungarian salami, a loaf of bread. We heard of people who spent days and even nights in cold, wet cemeteries – it was November – to avoid arrest. We heard rumours that any Jew who had not been rounded up was to turn himself in at the nearest police station. Someone, I think it was Uncle Max, actually tried to do so. The captain in charge said to him sotto voce: ‘Sir, please go home. Avoid the streets. Keep out of sight. And – good luck.’ On day two our phone was disconnected. Uncle Max’s phone, however, continued to function several days longer as did those of several other acquaintances. Max lived only just around the corner and I was sent over from time to time to enquire what news he had been able to gather. The radio said little, neither did the morning paper, which was delivered to our house, so every evening I was sent out to buy the evening papers. They, too, said nothing about the roundup. The worst moment came on day three: I remember it like a scene from a Hitchcock thriller: a car full of storm troopers drove slowly down the road and came to a stop right in front of our flat. This was it! We lived in a ground-floor apartment, raised over cellars, two or three feet higher than the pavement. From the pavement one could have seen anyone standing near the window, so my parents kept out of sight at the back of the sitting room. I, however, was detailed to stand by the window and watch the road. The trooper sitting beside the driver shuffled some papers. It seemed to take a very long time. Then the car drove slowly past our window and came to a stop outside the neighbouring apartment building. Two storm troopers, chin straps over jowls, got out and went in. A few minutes later they brought out a pale, trembling man and pushed him into the car. Then they drove off. My father was never arrested. Breslau Jews were transported to a concentration camp at Buchenwald, near the historic city of Weimar – Goethe’s city! The men were humiliated, often beaten and starved. Many were made to do hard labour. Most were unaccustomed to physical labour. They were accused of malingering and belaboured with whips or truncheons. Some were hanged for minor infringements of the rules. Others committed suicide by running into the electrified perimeter fences. Some five or six weeks later the first were released. They were usually people who could prove that they had a foreign visa and were ready to emigrate. One of our teachers, a Dr Tichauer was the first 61

SILESIA returnee I saw. He had lost a great amount of weight. His suit hung loosely on him and his collar seemed too big. His head had been shaved. I fear some of us giggled when he first entered the classroom. Before release, the concentration camp guards warned prisoners that if they did not leave Germany promptly they would be beaten to pulp. Moreover, if they ever talked about their experiences, they would be shot: ‘we’ll get you wherever you hide … Palestine or Patagonia. We’ll come after you.’ I do not know whether my father, who was far from robust, would have survived Buchenwald. The fates were kind to him. Or perhaps it was his courage in going into the centre of the storm that day – 10 November 1938 – that saved his life. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The times brought out the worst in people, and the best. Gentile businessmen pressurized their Jewish partners to sell them their share and bought them out at a fraction of the true value. Husbands divorced Jewish wives to hold onto jobs. Landlords threw out Jewish tenants if a Nazi cast an envious eye on an apartment. The year after we emigrated this happened to grandmother Fraenkel, a frail old lady in her seventies. She was ordered out of her apartment (the one with the beautiful cherry tree behind it) with only two or three days’ notice. There was no time to dispose of her property – most of her unfashionable Victorian furniture had to be chopped up and burnt in the backyard, singeing that very cherry tree. The experience would have made me hate all Germans if – in this pestilential atmosphere – there had not been a few who stood out. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Why didn’t we leave earlier? Were we inexcusably naïve? After all, five years before Kristallnacht my mother had witnessed horrors shortly after Hitler had become chancellor. She was on the way to the theatre with her father. Their tram stopped. A crowd blocked the road. In the midst of the crowd she recognized the former social democratic Oberpresident (provincial governor or prefect) of Silesia, Dr Luedemann, whom my mother knew personally. Her cousin Elfriede had been his private secretary. Mother had even accompanied Elfriede and Luedemann on electioneering tours. Together they had sung ‘Brothers, to sun and to freedom’, the socialist hymn. My mother had 62

WE BECAME JEWS mixed memories of that outing: after Luedemann’s populist oratory among the workers he invited Elfriede and her to dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in Breslau. This contrast between his oratory and his appetites worried my mother, especially since she felt herself the object of another of his appetites. However, she managed to keep him at arm’s length. My father, who knew nothing of all this at the time, was appalled when later she confessed that she had been on the campaign trail with the socialist prefect. She, the wife of a civil servant! That evening early in 1933 Luedemann appeared to have been strapped to the front of a slow-moving open car. He was stumbling as Nazi storm troopers hit out at him. Standing upright in the car, in his brown storm trooper’s uniform, was the new police commissioner for Silesia, Edmund Heines. This man had been known as a gang leader in street brawls. He had even been sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for a political murder, though he only served one year. That evening he was roaring encouragement to the crowd to join in the fun. Officials from Luedemann’s prefecture were brought out and ordered to spit at their former boss. My mother and grandfather did not go to the theatre that evening. Such public incidents were, however, confined to the first few months after the Nazi victory. The outrage – perhaps murder – I had seen as a child had been within days of the ‘seizure of power’. Hitler appears to have given his roughnecks a free rein in those first months. There were incidents spoken about in whispers and, of course, never reported in the domestic press. There was a colleague of my little grandfather’s who had, some years earlier, won a case against a Nazi Standartenfuehrer. In the course of cross-examination he had exposed the Nazi to ridicule and exposed him as a liar. A few days after the ‘seizure of power’ storm troopers ‘arrested’ the lawyer. Of course they had no legal rights to do any such thing. A week later the lawyer was brought back to his family in a sealed coffin. Strict orders were bawled at his wife to bury the man without breaking the seal. His grave was pointed out to me in the cemetery, not far from my grandfather’s. Next to it was a tap from which I filled a can that grandmother used to water the flowers on grandfather’s grave. Our visits were frequent, so I was constantly reminded of this story and fantasized about how they had done him in. Violence was not confined to the ‘rowdies’ (a good German word!) – the street brawlers of the SA. Even ‘upper class’ Nazis like Goering, son of a colonial governor and himself a highly decorated war hero, 63

SILESIA was involved. I heard this story many years later in central Africa from an elderly German-Jewish pilot known as Captain K – short for Katzenstein. He was by then too old to fly passenger airliners but considered safe enough to ferry black labour recruits to the South African goldfields. In the First World War he had served with the famous Richthofen ‘flying circus’ together with Goering. Von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, was shot down in a dogfight with a British pilot. (The Royal Air Force dropped a wreath behind the German lines. That must have been a gentlemanly war!) Goering then became the squadron’s commander and received the highest decorations. After the war, Captain K and a non-Jewish comrade from the Richthofen squadron started a small aircraft factory. Goering at that time worked as a commercial pilot and stunt flyer mainly in Sweden. In 1922 he returned to Germany and joined the Nazis. Hitler was delighted to have a war hero at his side. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, Goering was elected a member of parliament and was soon put on a parliamentary commission for aircraft procurement. Goering had remained on good terms with his two wartime comrades, even with Katzenstein, the Jew. Perhaps this was because he was chronically short of money and they were good for an occasional ‘touch’. They did, indeed, lend him money. I suspect they hoped he would support their bids for government contracts. When K related this story to us in Africa many years later, someone was rude enough to ask, ‘a bribe?’ K denied this in clipped Prussian tones. We did not bribe, neither him nor anyone else. We sued him for repayment. Would we have done that if it had been a bribe? Our case was to be heard early in 1933. It never was. A few days after the Nazi takeover, two storm troopers came to our works. They asked to see the two directors. I was out. They forced their way into my partner’s office, pulled out revolvers and shot him dead. My secretary managed to get to a phone. She stammered so much it took me some time to get the point. I never even collected my toothbrush. I got into my car and drove at full speed to the Dutch border. The next year, under pressure from the army, Hitler reined in his storm troopers. In the Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934, the police commissioner of Silesia, Edmund Heines, was stood up against a wall and shot. Shot with him was the young boy they found in bed 64

WE BECAME JEWS with him. Also shot was Roehm, the head of the SA – again together with a young male lover. Between 1934 and 1938 street violence stopped. Our naïve faith in German law and order recovered. So did that of millions of nonJewish Germans. After all, hadn’t demagogues throughout history promised or threatened much before achieving power but had quietened down once they had achieved it? Stupid? Maybe. But didn’t people go back home to San Francisco after the great earthquake, even though they knew they were living on a fault? We too lived on a fault: atrocious brutalities rumbled, but out of sight behind the barbed wires of concentration camps. We knew little of this. The main sufferers were communists or active pacifists or Jehovah’s Witnesses. My family had neither communists, nor pacifists nor Jehovah’s Witnesses among their circle. There were, however, social democrats and at least one of them, a Dr Korn, was subjected to Nazi ‘re-education’. Korn was a medical man and a social democrat deputy in the Prussian state assembly. According to my mother he was also an inspiring orator. She had accompanied him, too, on the campaign trail – again without my father’s knowledge. His perorations often climaxed with a medical analysis: ‘Hitler? A case for the psychiatrists!’ I remember Dr Korn coming to my parents’ table in one of those gemütlich Breslau cafés. He was dressed in the green uniform of the Reichsbanner, the social democrat’s answer to the uniformed Nazis. Instead of their swastika armbands his displayed three red arrows. He greeted us with the Reichsbanner’s salute, a raised fist stretched high. My father considered this embarrassing and ill mannered. After the Nazi takeover Dr Korn was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. A year or so later we met that same Dr Korn in an open-air café in one of those beautiful parks that surround Breslau. To my parents’ amazement he was now wearing the brown uniform of a Nazi storm trooper. He pretended not to recognize us. Not long after we heard he had committed suicide. Between his release and suicide, did my parents ever phone Korn to ask what had happened at Buchenwald to cause him to change his uniform? The most noticeable form of Nazi oppression was by means of technically legal enactments: laws preventing Jewish doctors or lawyers from attending to Gentiles, laws banning marriage between Jews and ‘Aryans’, laws banning sexual relations. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ

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SILESIA How did the Nazi years affect a small child? My first day at school was unfortunate: 1 April 1933 – ‘boycott day’. The Nazis had only been in power two months. Throughout Germany, storm troopers picketed Jewish businesses – from greengrocers to large department stores, carrying posters: ‘Don’t buy from Jews,’ ‘The Jews are our misfortune,’ ‘Buy only from Germans.’ They painted slogans on display windows. They barracked customers who dared to cross picket lines. Few had the courage to do so. But I knew nothing about all this. I remember only the excitement of being taken to a ‘real’ school. My mother accompanied me and so did my tall grandfather. I was given two cardboard cones with sweets and toys. We were ushered into the ‘Aula’. The headmaster welcomed us. One of the teachers read us fairytales that were illustrated with coloured slides, which a second teacher projected. I thought it all great fun and assumed that from now on every school day would be taken up with slideshows and fairytales! As for what was happening outside – I only heard about it many years later. My mother and my grandfather must have been very disturbed by what was going on but they succeeded in hiding it from me. I had been sent to the Sauerbrunnen School, the school nearest to our apartment. That was the norm. There was none of the national neurosis about choice of schools that I, myself, was to find in England when I had children of my own. In Germany at that time children of all social classes mixed in the same classroom. Sauerbrunnen – sour well – was a Catholic state school for boys: a large red brick complex by the side of a pond that contained sour water. All the staff was Catholic. Our teacher, for the first three years, was a Herr Lerche. He taught all subjects except religious instruction, which the headmaster did himself. Lerche was one of those rare people with civic courage. Although the educational system was centrally prescribed, Herr Lerche found time for lessons not ordained by Berlin. When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935 he lectured us on how wrong it was for the strong to attack the weak and how unjustified claims to racial superiority were. We should judge people by their soul. At the next parent-teacher meeting my mother complimented him. ‘My God!’ said Herr Lerche, ‘if the little blighters understand what I am trying to say, I’d better be more careful.’ At the end of my third year he was replaced. My parents were perturbed, fearing Lerche had been dismissed. In fact, they heard later, he had been promoted to be headmaster of a girls’ school. Of the headmaster’s religious instruction, I remember best his 66

WE BECAME JEWS explanation of the seventh commandment. The injunction against adultery would have meant little to us but he paraphrased this: ‘Thou shalt not live unchastely.’ This, too, would not have meant much to us at the age of seven or eight. He explained that it was unchaste to run around the house displaying our naked bottoms! Once two colourfully dressed gypsies with earrings, bright scarves and bushy beards brought a handsome little dark boy to our school. Our class was just marching noisily up the stairs when these exotic characters passed us. The class jeered. A few minutes later the headmaster brought the little boy to our class and denounced our behaviour angrily. Then he turned to the gypsy child and asked: ‘Do you know how to pray?’ The little boy nodded and, to our amazement, went down on his knees in front of the class and declaimed the Lord’s Prayer. One or two of us started to giggle but he prayed with such feeling that an awed silence fell upon the class. When he reached the ‘Amen’ the headmaster joined in. He then turned to us and said: ‘you have just seen true fervour. This boy has set us an example to make us all feel humble.’ The dark-haired child only remained in our class a few weeks. Perhaps his nomadic people moved on. Perhaps the antagonism of the locals drove them away. What happened to him in the end I can, alas, guess only too well. The Nazis murdered 200,000 gypsies – subhuman like we Jews – by shooting or gassing. I hope that his religious faith helped him in the hour of his death. There have been few to light a candle or to say a Kaddish for the gypsies. It was fortunate that the little boy was no longer in our class when Herr Lerche’s replacement arrived, a Herr Krajewsky. This was a fanatical Nazi. The name suggests Polish origin. Perhaps that was why he strove to be more Nazi than the Germans. He lectured the class on Nazi race theory, made derogatory remarks about inferior peoples (avoiding any reference to the inferiority of the Slavs) and lauded the Führer. Instead of our customary morning greeting ‘Grüss Gott’ he started each day with an outstretched arm: ‘Heil Hitler’. He distributed photographs of the Führer. Even I bought one: children are great conformists. I did indeed put it up over my bed, but the following day it had disappeared. I suspected my mother. Not long after Krajewsky’s arrival, the entire school was assembled in the playground. Some men in storm trooper uniform arrived – apparently to give us a lecture. I heard Krajewsky going up to the headmaster and saying quietly: ‘and what about the Semite?’ Perhaps he used the plural. It seems unlikely that I was the only Jewish child in the school, but I do not know. It had never become an issue. Not for me anyway. The headmaster had 67

SILESIA apparently not thought about his Jewish pupil or pupils. After a moment’s hesitation he came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘Fraenkel, go back to the classroom, get your satchel, pack your books and go home. You’re let off for the rest of the day.’ Not long after this my parents moved me to a Jewish school. In this they anticipated new legislation that banned Jews from attending ‘Aryan’ schools, but only by a few months. Among my classmates at Sauerbrunnen School had been a lad called Säbel. We had been on friendly terms. He used to amuse our class by telling us ‘I am called Säbel (sabre) and I have a sabre.’ We thought him a great wit. His family lived in an ill-lit basement not far from our school. Once or twice he invited me home to admire his sabre – a French officer’s sword his father had brought home as a war trophy. He also demonstrated an early phonograph his father had plundered in France. Scratchy songs in a language we did not understand emerged from cylinder rolls through a large trumpet-like megaphone. A year or so after I had been withdrawn from the Sauerbrunnen School the two of us met among allotments and fields on the outskirts of Breslau; I was out collecting plants. At the time I was passionate about botany. Säbel was wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth. ‘Yid,’ he barked at me, ‘what are you doing?’ I explained. ‘Who taught you about plants?’ ‘My aunt Helene Bloch. She knows about such things. She is a teacher.’ ‘You have more bloody clever relatives?’ I remained silent. ‘Answer! What other relatives have you got?’ ‘Well, there is Aunt Gerda in South Africa.’ He slapped my face hard. ‘That’s for your Aunt Helene.’ Then he struck my other cheek. Not being a Christian I had not even contemplated turning it to him. ‘And that’s for your Aunt Gerda.’ I reeled. ‘What others? Come on! What other relatives have you got? You Jews breed like rats. Everyone knows that.’ I thought it prudent to deny my other uncles and aunts. He grabbed me by the shirt and shook me until I conceded Uncle Max and Aunt Trudi Spiro. More blows. He looked at me sideways: ‘Jews have sticky-out ears,’ he announced and eyed me uncertainly. My ears do not stick out. ‘And curly black hair.’ My hair was straight and fair. ‘And they have thick lips, like niggers.’ Again, I did not conform. ‘Jews have big hook noses.’ Not even in that respect did I conform to what he had been taught in Rassenkunde – his race studies lessons. 68

WE BECAME JEWS Perhaps he would have been relieved to know that some years later, at puberty, I did develop a large nose, though not a hooked one. The incident still puzzles me. Säbel may not have been any stronger than I was. But the thought of striking back never entered my mind. He was, of course, in a uniform, the uniform of an authority of some sort. But was that all? In later years Jewish passivity in the face of murderers became a matter of much discussion, especially in Israel: why did they go passively into the gas chambers? This was, of course, not the fate facing me in 1937 or 1938. But why did it never even occur to me that I might give him a bloody nose? If anyone had attacked me in the playground of my new Jewish school I would have fought back. I must have sensed that the cards were stacked against me. Policemen would not have protected me. Passing adults would probably not have come to my aid, or if they had they would have turned away when they realized who I was – unless they were rare and unusual people. But it does still perturb me: did I not contribute to my thrashing by my own timidity? My cousin Klaus was attacked in a similar way in a swimming pool. He was fortunate: A non-Jewish boy went to his aid and bashed the bully. However, later, in the dressing cubicles, the good Christian reproached Klaus, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a Jew? I wouldn’t have taken your side. See what you made me do to another Christian.’ My parents did not like me strolling around the outskirts of Breslau by myself. My set-to with Säbel was, however, the only time I was attacked. There were days when, coming from school, we spotted gangs of Hitler youths waiting for us at the corner. My friends and I then judged it prudent to dodge around back streets or to run for it. I was never caught. Some of my classmates were. They reported that they, too, had been bullied into listing their relatives and had received a blow for each one. Were the Hitler Youth actually trained in bullying? There were two Jewish schools in Breslau, one part of the liberal community and the other closer to the orthodox. They had been established much earlier for that minority of Jews who preferred their children brought up in an all-Jewish environment. Of course, in the Nazi period they received a great influx from families who, previously, would not have wanted their children brought up segregated. I was sent to the orthodox-oriented school, the Rehdigerplatz Realschule. This must have been because this school was nearer our apartment and, perhaps, because it had a better reputation. It was, in fact, by far the most stimulating educational establishment I have ever experienced. Large numbers of Jewish teachers had lost their jobs in the 69

SILESIA state system so our school must have had its pick of the best. Moreover, they were strongly motivated. They knew they had to equip us for a difficult life ahead. The most forceful personality among them was the music teacher, Herr Werner – a composer himself. He strove to convince us that there was no more important subject in the world than music. Before very long the entire class – bar one tone-deaf child – had learnt to take music dictation. He played a tune on the piano. We wrote it down. I am, alas, not musical but I made friends with a classmate who was a talented pianist. First he allowed me to crib his music dictation. Then he offered to take me home to help me catch up. After two or three afternoons of his tuition I managed to keep up without cribbing. I became so enthusiastic about music that I even started composing. I persuaded my father to play the first of my Lieder on his violin. He said I was, alas, no Mozart! My helpful classmate, Walter Ahrends, had a very special status. No other pupil in our class enjoyed such respect. Herr Werner regarded him as an infant prodigy. Walter told me that his first piano teacher had recently insisted that he be transferred to another. There was nothing more he, the first, could teach Walter. The boy was then 10 or 11. This would have given most boys of that age a swollen head. It appeared to have no such effect on him. He was very highly-strung, very thin, very edgy, very quick in his movements and constantly worried that he could not live up to what was expected of him. He practised every spare moment. Even when I visited him, hoping we could play with his tin soldiers, he asked me to sit and wait while he practised one more sonata. When I said goodbye to him before departing for Africa he told me that his family were planning to emigrate to Argentina. His new teacher had assured his parents that very shortly Walter would be able to support the family by giving concerts. For many years I have hoped to read about him in the papers. Was he performing in Buenos Aires, in New York, in Paris? I fantasized that when he eventually came to London I would go to his concert. After the applause had subsided I would go to his dressing room and remind him of the Rehdigerplatz Realschule and that it was he who had taught me the elements of musical notation. But I never once read about Walter Ahrends in the music columns of newspapers even though, for many years, my job required that I skim six or seven daily papers each morning. Had he, after all, been one of those febrile Wunderkinder whose talents fizzle out early?

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WE BECAME JEWS ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Fortunately, we cannot see the future. Our concerns were with the present: schoolwork. We were lucky to have such stimulating teachers. But there was something more important than their excellent teaching of Latin, English, Hebrew or maths. They built up our morale. They taught us Jewish history, our contribution to culture, to science, to world religions. So the rabble outside treated us as pariahs? Our people had experienced persecution before and had survived. Where was the Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus? Where Haman who plotted the massacre of the Jews in the land of the Medes and Persians? Where Torquemada and all those other persecutors whom the rest of the world has forgotten but who are still recalled in the long chronicle of our martyrdom? When survival meant dishonour had we not acquitted ourselves heroically, like the Jews of York in England who had been burnt to death rather than submit to conversion? We few – we small band of German Jews – had produced as many Nobel prizewinners as all the other Germans put together and more than many of the most multitudinous nations of the world. Why? Because persecution had sharpened our wits, as had our ancestors’ constant study of the Bible and of the intricacies of the Talmud. Since time immemorial Jews had been literate and intellectually active. (It is not true, as I discovered later, but we chose to believe it.) Had we German-speaking Jews not produced Einstein and Freud and Marx (the last, alas, a renegade convert)? And were these three not the founders of modern thought? I do not know whether our teachers had any deep impact on pupils who had been brought up in a consciously Jewish environment. They certainly had on those of us who came from an assimilationist background where the parents had taught us little about the Jewish heritage. The very quality of the teaching we received, compared with that in our earlier schools, must have contributed to making us believe that we were intellectually superior – a dangerous delusion. At that time, however, it helped to fortify us against the yobbos who tried to waylay us outside. Our teachers made us hold up our heads. We sang rousing Zionist songs in the language of our ancestors. We had an hour of Hebrew tuition each day, which was more than was given to any other subject. We used textbooks imported from Poland. The printing was crude. Colours were never correctly aligned. This merely confirmed our 71

SILESIA prejudices about Poland and Polish Jews. But conversely the texts were spirited and amusing and were better – so far as a child could judge – than the German textbooks we had for Latin or English. Our teachers tried to convince us that our future lay in Palestine and in Jewish nationhood. I spent some weekends collecting money for the Jewish National Fund. New settlements would arise. Orange groves would spring out of stony rubble. The desert would bloom as a result of our efforts. ‘Back to the Land’ was very much part of Zionism: back to the soil, away from the over sophisticated cities and airless ghettos. I now realize that there was a strong element of Russian left-wing thinking in our Zionism – more of the ‘back to the peasantry’ Narodniks than of the later Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. But a naïve Marxism influenced what we were taught about Palestinian Arabs. Arabs would represent no threat to our future Jewish state. These were oppressed people, exploited by feudal pashas and emirs. Very soon they would realize that their interests coincided with those of the Jewish masses. The development of Palestine would bring them rising living standards and new freedoms. They would then turn against their oppressors and march into the future hand in hand with us. What about the Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron? Well, poor illeducated felahin were easily misled and incited by agitators paid by their oppressors. But this would not last. Did our teachers believe all this? We youngsters certainly did and I had no qualms about taking around the little blue-and-white collection boxes. This was, for me, an educational experience. Until then I had believed that all German Jews lived in bourgeois comfort. Yes, I must have lived a very sheltered life. Of course I knew about the genteel poverty of Aunt Emma and Aunt Doris, but that was because the great inflation had deprived these well-bred ladies of the capital that rightfully should have been theirs. Now I met Jews who appeared not to be bourgeois at all. They lived without carpets, an entire family in one room in dark houses in dingy back courtyards. The smell of cabbage pervaded their stairwells. Men pleaded that they could not afford even ten pfennigs for my collection because they had to buy food. They were themselves surviving on handouts from philanthropic foundations. It is true, Jews were proportionally over represented among lawyers, doctors and university lecturers but this conveyed a false impression – not only to an 11-year-old. As I read in later years, ‘the majority of German Jews in 1933 belonged socially to the lower middle and working classes.’ 72

WE BECAME JEWS ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I became a Jew. I went home and demanded that my family stop eating pork. I never succeeded in changing their eating habits. I did, however, stop them sending me to school with ham sandwiches in my satchel. Friends of the family invited me to my first ‘real’ Passover. As the youngest I had to learn to ask the Hebrew questions that provoke the hours-long response, which tells the tale of the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt – not their exodus, as the ancient text insists, but my exodus. ‘Wherein is this night different from all other nights?’ I found it strangely moving to use the very words that had been chanted by ‘us’ for centuries; to hear my host lift up the unleavened matzo and call in the long-dead Aramaic language (the language that Jesus spoke). ‘This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors did eat in the land of Egypt. Let all those who are hungered come and eat.’ And yet, to come back to that school, it was in some ways very German. There is a contemptuous German saying ‘Wie eine Judenschule’ – noisy, undisciplined, chaotic ‘like a Jew school’. The Rehdigerplatz Realschule was nothing like this. There was firm discipline. Hard work was expected of us. The teachers were concerned about physical training – just like Germans. If we were going to make the desert of Judaea blossom like the rose, we would have to steel our muscles. I was totally untalented in sports. This worried my teachers. It also worried my father. So I was sent off, twice a week, to the RJF gym. There I was made to jump over wooden horses, swing on horizontal bars, haul myself up ropes, and up cold metal bars. The last I never did manage to do. I did press-ups and more press-ups to the clipped military commands of an instructor. I hated it. It started a lifelong distaste for sports in any shape or form. Later I discovered the origins of this organization that ran the gym: the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten – the National Association of Jewish Frontline Soldiers. It was set up after the First World War to confront anti-Semitic propaganda and to prove that Jews were German patriots as fervent as any Protestants or Catholics. It was they who collated statistics to show that Jews had been slaughtered ‘in the same proportion as other Germans stemming from the same social and economic strata’. One of their sidelines was to develop biceps as well as the patriotic spirit. They did not want young Jews to grow up as pale, stooping ghetto figures. They launched a back to the land movement, but no, not in Palestine – they were strongly anti-Zionist – on German soil! They did 73

SILESIA not have much success with this. At any rate, such were the objectives of the association when first founded. By 1937, however, even the exsergeant majors who drilled us had, I think, come to think of us as future chalutzim – pioneers for Palestine. My father was not a great sportsman either, but more so than I. He played tennis and in winter he went skiing. He was a keen walker and often took me with him. On these walks we rehearsed English and Latin vocabulary. But he had a disconcerting habit, which interrupted our walks around Breslau. He would stop at Stürmer display cases. Der Stürmer was a weekly journal published by the most unsavoury of the Nazi rabble-rousers, Julius Streicher, party boss for Franconia. By 1940 even the Nazis found him an embarrassment and kicked him out of that position. He was accused of rape, of visiting prisons to whip inmates for his personal amusement and of enriching himself on stolen Jewish property. Der Stürmer was a unique paper. Under a regime that labelled pornography as un-German, sick and typical of the decadent years of the Weimar Republic, the Stürmer provided ‘healthy’ pornography: lascivious stories about the seduction of innocent blonde Aryan maidens by fat, swarthy Jews. But it had a second target – Catholic priests, the perverters of clean-living German boys. It carried reports about the goings-on in convents and monasteries and, worst of all, in the cellars of the Vatican! Why did my father enjoy reading this scurrilous rag? Was it because he enjoyed the porn? Or? He once re-enacted for me a comic sketch he had seen at a Jewish cabaret. Two men are sitting in a railway compartment. One looks noticeably Jewish; the other is fairhaired and apparently ‘Aryan’. The latter is reading Der Stürmer. There is a long and awkward silence. After a while the Stürmer reader takes out his pocket diary, turns over some pages and asks the other: ‘Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me when is the first night of Rosh Hashanah?’ – the Jewish New Year. ‘Hey? – You – you’re one of us?’ ‘But of course.’ ‘So why the hell are you reading the Stürmer?’ ‘Look – if I read the Jewish press I get ever so depressed. South Africa has now closed its borders to Jews. In Romania there has been a pogrom. In Poland the anti-Semitic party is gaining ground. Gloom! Nothing but gloom! But … if I read the Stürmer I find that the Elders of Zion rule the world, that Jewish capitalists dominate America; Jewish commissars have Russia in their grasp. Jews seduce the most 74

WE BECAME JEWS beautiful women in the world! I love the Stürmer!’ Could my father have felt the same? The Stürmer had a very different effect on me, aged 10 or 11. I have a very clear memory of a cartoon showing a kosher butchery: a disgusting looking fat and hook-nosed Jew, with greasy hair and sticky-out ears, is wearing a bloodstained apron. He is feeding rats into a mincing machine. At the other end out come sausages labelled ‘guaranteed kosher’. Although my school had greatly raised my Jewish consciousness, this cartoon troubled me. Kosher slaughter was banned in Germany so I had no experience of it, but on our next trip to Marienbad – across the Czech border – my parents happened to buy some kosher frankfurters for a picnic in the mountains. This ‘bornagain’ Jew could not eat them!

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Chapter 4

Exodus 1938. A moonless night. The distant sound of an aircraft flying high. Suddenly, a shaft of light points into the dark sky – a powerful searchlight – followed a moment later by a second and a third. The searchlights appear to be placed some miles apart. Three beams stray around the sky for a while, searching. Then one of them picks up the plane in its beam. Within seconds the others point on it, too. The plane is caught at the apex of triangles of light. They resemble a tent in the sky. ‘They’re getting better,’ said my father glancing at his watch, ‘It took them less than two minutes tonight.’ These were the days before radar, or at least before the Germans had it. On dark nights we would enjoy these games in the sky while out walking. One of the searchlights was placed near our flat, on a hill we used for tobogganing in winter and for flying kites in summer. People whispered that after dark anti-aircraft batteries were trucked up that hill. My father, as a former artilleryman, explained to me how the guns would be trained on the plane. The angle of the beams, he said, could be used to calculate its altitude. The events of Kristallnacht, November 1938, had at long last persuaded my father that my mother had been right: we had to emigrate. The preparations for war, all around us, made it urgent. Once our telephone had been reconnected – I think this happened two or three weeks after the arrests had ceased – my parents spent days placing long-distance calls. Then they sat near the telephone for hours waiting to be put through. My father queued at foreign consulates to enquire about visas. The queues were long. All around us were preparations for war. There were practice blackouts. Windows had to be covered with heavy black curtains or stiff black paper. Car headlights were partly obscured. Air-raid wardens patrolled the streets. One night I heard a shrill whistle and angry shouting from the street. The warden had spotted a chink of light escaping from our block of flats. It certainly did not come from our apartment. My father was far too meticulous! Even during such blackouts my father and I would go on our 76

EXODUS evening walks carrying a torch covered with blue cellophane. My father would point out different constellations: the Plough, the Twins. After a moment he said: ‘They refer to Africa as the Dark Continent, but it’s Europe that is becoming a dark continent.’ If he could have looked into the future he might have prophesied that we would experience dark savagery in Europe but not in Africa. Large military barracks were built a mile or so from our apartment. Acquaintances spoke about moving away from such an obvious target! Others argued this was unnecessary. ‘They’ had been clever: from the air the new barracks were indistinguishable from the housing estates around them. A deep cellar, two houses from ours, was reinforced and designated the neighbourhood air-raid shelter. No one could have imagined that when war did eventually break out, Jews would be banned from air-raid shelters. There were practice alerts: the howl of air-raid sirens became familiar. They came from loudspeakers that had been installed at every second or third street corner. They served more than one purpose: from time to time they blasted out martial music and, shrillest of all, Hitler’s speeches. However firmly we closed our double-glazed windows, we had to hear his ranting, the roars of applause and the massed speaking choruses: ‘Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!’ Austria reunited to the Reich! The Sudeten Germans brought home! The rest of Czechoslovakia overrun! Triumph after triumph – all achieved within 12 months and all without a shot being fired. Support for Hitler was growing. Here was the man who was avenging the humiliations of the Versailles Diktat. Germans could hold up their heads again. He came to Breslau once and was given a hero’s welcome. Cousin Klaus’s nursemaid, even though she came from a left-wing family, went to see him. She came back quivering with excitement: ‘the eyes,’ she told my father, ‘those wonderful, penetrating eyes – hypnotic!’ Breslau was not far from the Czechoslovak border. A day or two before the seizure of the Sudetenland columns of armoured cars were parked in our street and stood there for several hours. They must have been waiting for access to choked-up roads leading to the border. The wife of the grocer at the corner brewed pots of coffee and filled mugs for the men in the drizzle. I too went out into the drizzle to get a better look at the armoured vehicles. My father said that the men were far better kitted out than troops in the First World War. They wore fashionable rubberized raincoats. The rest of Europe still spoke of disarmament. ‘No more war’. In Germany the Hitler Youth were taught that struggle steeled a nation. 77

SILESIA War was healthy. Without war nations became soft and decadent. On one of my plant-collecting walks I watched youngsters not much older than I – they were perhaps 13 or 14 – practising throwing hand grenades, dummy grenades shaped like heavy mallets with long wooden handles. Many of these young enthusiasts probably froze to death in the steppes of Russia. ‘Führer befehl! Wir folgen!’ Leader command! We follow! Was there no one to stop that man? Surely, said Uncle Max to my father, analysing the state of the world as they did ever so frequently, the British and French would intervene. They simply had to do something! But Hitler’s press mocked the Western democracies. They were feeble and decadent, as ineffectual as democracy had been in Germany to stop Hitler’s rise. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, was a favourite target of the cartoonists. He was easily cartooned. People (including ourselves) thought Chamberlain’s umbrella ridiculous. In Germany umbrellas were considered outmoded, certainly the walking stick variety. Perhaps timid little ladies carried umbrellas – but men? I remember a cartoon around the time of Munich: Chamberlain, his scrawny turkey neck protruding from an old-fashioned stiff collar, was spitting out the words: ‘Those Germans will see, I’ve got teeth!’ And, indeed, in his right hand he held up a tumbler, contained his false ones. Of course, we did not know at the time that Hitler had given instructions to his generals to prepare for war. One did, however, sense it and even my father realized that war boded ill for us. Much of the world had, by 1939, closed its doors to German Jewish immigration. Britain, for example, would only admit old people whose children had settled there earlier and were in a position to support them. Switzerland barred all but the very wealthiest. The United States had a quota system and waiting lists were long. The British mandate authorities in Palestine had reduced migration to a trickle in response to Arab pressure. Besides, my father was not too keen on Palestine. ‘The Jews may be the salt of the earth,’ he quipped, ‘but what will grow on soil that is all salt?’ Somehow we obtained Peruvian visas. We thought of Peru not as a fixed abode, but as a temporary place of asylum until we could get into the United States. My parents preferred an English-speaking country. They both had some English but no Spanish. A wealthy Texan Jewish philanthropist – a very distant relative – gave us an affidavit for the USA. This was a document guaranteeing that the signatory would support us financially if we should become destitute 78

EXODUS in the USA. This was to ensure that we would not become a charge on the public purse. American sympathizers issued thousands of such affidavits – God bless them – on the tacit understanding that the immigrants would not invoke them. When my father presented our affidavit to the US consulate we were given a document that said that we would be issued a US visa on the 1941 quota. Or was it 1942? But could one wait that long? War might break out any time. All these anxieties were discussed in my presence. No one thought a child should be protected from such worries. Rather the opposite: a child had to be well briefed. An incautious childish remark could endanger a whole family. Uncle Friedrich, now settled in South Africa, managed to obtain two visas for us – for Swaziland and Northern Rhodesia. Again we thought of these as not fixed abodes for life but as temporary places of refuge, hoping to move on to South Africa if ever that country relaxed its restrictions. My father went to the British consulate in Breslau, carrying his English–German dictionary, and spent a day reading in the library. He came back saying that Northern Rhodesia, with its rich copper resources, seemed a better prospect than Swaziland. The books he had consulted did not tell him that the mines were then ‘in mothballs’. Copper mining had been stopped during the depression. But the threat of war stimulated the reopening of the richer ore bodies, so his judgement turned out right after all. That is how we became Rhodesians! I was delighted: I imagined Rhodesia to be like Ethiopia – exotic and exciting and I had identified passionately with Ethiopia. What I did not know until many years later was that around that time my mother became pregnant and had an induced abortion. How could she cope with a baby and emigration at the same time? Some of our class made a cycle excursion to Mount Zobten, 20 miles or so from Breslau. On the way the young teacher who led our group told me about Cecil Rhodes, who had given his name (for a while, at any rate) to my future home. ‘All red from Cape to Cairo’ had been his dream. No, Fraenkel, red means British! Look at your atlas! One other thing the teacher said as we cycled side-by-side disconcerted me: ‘You’ll find that the most important subject in the British educational system is – sports!’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ ‘Umsatteln’ – to change saddles – engendered a small home industry. People with professions that would be useless abroad were happy to 79

SILESIA pay others who would teach them exportable skills. And what could have been more useless in central Africa than my father’s qualifications: a degree in German law and 15 years’ experience of the German tax system? He took a crash course in English bookkeeping. ‘My God,’ he groaned, ‘how can they hang onto a currency like that? Twelve pence in a shilling, twenty shillings in a pound; here, Peter, you try multiplying five pounds, twelve shillings and eight pence by six!’ My mother was not burdened by an unsuitable education. She had left school without a school certificate and had had no further formal education. She had never had a job but had got engaged at 19 and had married at 20. Perhaps that was why she proved far more flexible, more adaptable than my father. Of course, she was also 16 years younger. She had always made simple dresses. Now she learnt more sophisticated skills, like making dress patterns and accessories such as felt flowers and leather belts. Uncle Friedrich, in South Africa, advised my father to learn how to make soap, perfumes and simple household remedies. A Berlin man advertised tuition in just such skills so my father spent two or three weeks with him. He came back with a folder full of recipes. ‘I didn’t learn very much,’ he grumbled. ‘Only one thing that could be useful: Attar of roses! Did you know that a small bottle of the stuff is worth more than a Leica camera? But customs officers won’t know that, so it’s easy to smuggle out.’ I was amazed: my father was planning to break the law! Before leaving Berlin my father visited the Tropical Institute. From the institute’s shop he brought back jars of quinine, curiously shaped solar topees, mosquito nets, ultra-lightweight suits and well-ventilated raincoats. He also brought a very long torch the like of which we had never seen. He had asked the salesman why anyone would need such a torch. ‘If you have to go to your toilet at night, it will probably be an outside toilet, you will need a powerful torch so that you don’t step on a snake.’ My father repeated this to us, back in Breslau, a little embarrassed and apologized for having fallen for this sales talk. But the shop assistant’s advice turned out to be precisely correct! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The Nazi authorities submitted Jews to the most extraordinary pettifogging regulations. Unemployed Jewish lawyers made a living helping would-be émigrés through this labyrinth. Unemployed accountants prepared documents to prove that the would-be émigré had paid every pfennig of his taxes since 1933, or even before. For my 80

EXODUS father all this was easier than for most: His civil servant’s taxes had been deducted at source. As a lawyer by training he could cope with pages of form filling without resort to outside advisers. Ever-new decrees appeared: Jews had to register their valuables – gold, silver, jewellery. My mother decided, without telling my father, to hide her best pieces of jewellery. Many others did not dare to do similarly because they were afraid their domestic servants might denounce them. In our case we knew we were safe with Frau Klose. After the war, when there were severe food shortages in Germany, my parents made great efforts to trace the Kloses and to offer help. They never succeeded. If the Kloses did survive the lengthy battle for Breslau, they may have perished in an icy cattle truck. After the war the Poles drove a million or more Germans out of Silesia. Thousands perished in the cold – left for days at railway siding in mid-winter without food or water. This is a horror story that the world has chosen to forget. Justified revenge? Yes, in some cases. But Frau Klose and her husband deserved better. The next Nazi measures against us were predictable. Gold and silver had to be ‘sold’ to the state. I helped my father carry our best silver to the Dresdener Bank in two suitcases. The law allowed us to keep a few items: one silver spoon, knife and fork per family member, I think. But we could choose to retain its equivalent by weight. My parents selected a pair of antique Sabbath candlesticks. I did not think they were particularly beautiful but they had been in the family for generations. When we brought our hoard to the bank the silver was weighed on a scale. There was a fine eighteenth-century soup terrine and – so far as a child could judge – some quite good nineteenth-century monogrammed cutlery. All was paid for by weight. Artistic or antique value was not taken into account. No doubt the authorities did not apply the same valuation when they resold their booty. More regulations: there was a hefty collective fine imposed on the Jewish community after the assassination of von Rath, the third secretary at the German embassy in Paris by a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. Grynszpan’s parents had been among thousands of Polish Jews rounded up in Germany with no notice and dumped at the Polish frontier. The Poles did not want them back. Thousands camped for days in no-man’s land. Tippett’s opera A Child of our Time recalls the hostility they met: We cannot have them in our Empire. 81

SILESIA They shall not work nor draw the dole. Let them starve in No-Man’s Land. The von Rath assassination provided the excuse for Kristallnacht. The Nazi press said it was the outraged public that had burnt synagogues and smashed up shops. The mass deportation of Jews to concentration camps was a protective measure – to save them from the fury of the crowds. But I was there. My father and I stood in the crowd in front of a burning synagogue. That crowd was silent, as if awestruck at the enormity of the outrage. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ More form filling: customs regulations for émigrés were complicated: a complete list of all items to be exported had to be submitted. This had to list separately items newly acquired; items acquired between 1933 and 1938 and items acquired before 1933. Different customs duties applied to each category. Packing had to be done in the presence of a customs officer who came to the house to ensure that only listed items were packed. With the capital that grandmother had made over to us my parents bought goods that might have a good resale value abroad: a sophisticated camera, electric fans, a mangle for ironing sheets – and attar of roses! They also invested in things that might help them make a living abroad: a new electric sewing machine for my mother, leather and leather working equipment to make belts, supplies of felt to turn into felt flowers. Money was being spent at a rate previously unknown in my frugal family. Even though we had to pay 100 per cent duty on new purchases, this was more advantageous than trying to transfer grandmother’s money: each adult was allowed to take abroad ten marks in German currency – less than £1 sterling at the 1939 exchange rate. Any additional foreign currency had to be purchased at a punitive exchange rate for émigrés. We had to pay 100 marks to obtain eight Sperrmark – blocked marks. These could then be exchanged for pounds sterling at the normal commercial rate. That meant the Nazis pocketed 92 per cent of our property. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ We put up a notice on our window: ‘BOOKS AND FURNITURE FOR SALE’. A day or two later there was a ring at the door: ‘Gestapo!’ A plain82

EXODUS clothed officer demanded to see what books we were selling. He checked the shelves against a list and pulled out books by Jewish authors and by non-Jewish subversives such as Thomas Mann and Brecht. ‘You will take these to the nearest police station – within 24 hours.’ The police were only just across the road, at the nearest corner. I helped my father carry some 20 or so books across. The captain of police came out of his office when he saw us. He glanced at the books, and then asked my father to accompany him to his office. I was left behind – worried. Would he be arrested for possessing dangerous literature? Would he end up at Buchenwald? I waited for what seemed a very long time, chewing my fingernails. Then my father emerged. The captain shook hands with him and then came to shake hands even with me. He addressed my father as ‘Herr Regierungsrat’. Not until we got back to the flat would my father talk. He had realized immediately that this was the captain who, on day two or day three after Kristallnacht, had sent Uncle Max home and advised him to keep his head down. ‘He asked me whether the Gestapo man had listed the titles of the books. I had noticed that he had only made a note of the number, not the titles. Then the captain said: ‘Good! There are several books here I have been wanting to read for a long time. I do hope you don’t mind? I’ll substitute some others before I send them on.’ The captain had retained my father for a lengthy conversation. For a while they had talked about books; then the captain had confided to him that until recently all the men under his command had been good, decent older men. My father interpreted this to me: it probably meant they had been selected for their political sympathies in the days of Prussia’s social democratic government. But in the last years, the captain had complained, he had been made to accept some young Nazi Schweinehunde. Well, he kept them in their place, the arrogant young bastards. He sent them on all the least pleasant jobs. If ever my father should have any trouble with that scum, he was to give him a ring at once. We had one more contact with the Gestapo. Some document we needed in order to emigrate had been delayed. My father suggested it would be better if my mother went. She found herself in the presence of a brash and bullying official. She burst into tears. The man was suddenly disconcerted and apologized. ‘Please do not distress yourself, gnädige Frau,’ (gracious lady) ‘I am sure we can sort this out.’ And, eventually, he did. When she reported back my father smiled: ‘I knew I could rely on your tear ducts.’ One evening, after dark, some time around that period, Teddy 83

SILESIA Neumann the artist, our old friend from Cosel, came to see my parents. I was already in bed but I heard raised, angry voices. My mother was shouting. I was distressed. I loved Teddy. I crept to the door to listen. I heard her telling him she wanted nothing more to do with him or with any other German. She did not trust any of them. No, not even him. My father tried to calm her down but she was unstoppable: they were all the same, these Germans – anti-Semites if you scratched them. Now, would he please get out and leave us in peace? What might have accentuated her fury was that he had confessed, on an earlier visit, that he had ‘crept to Canossa’ (his phrase). He had come to a compromise of sorts with the regime. In 1933 his paintings had been classified as ‘decadent art’ and he had been banned from exhibiting. Some years later an official had visited him and suggested he could rehabilitate himself. All he needed to do was to paint something that indicated his sympathy for the new Germany, in a realistic style of course. My father had long advised him to make his peace with ‘them’. But then my father never did approve of Teddy’s cubist period. Teddy had thought long and hard. He now had family responsibilities. He had married recently and his wife was pregnant. He decided to make a concession – the smallest he could think of. He painted a realistic landscape of an Upper Silesian mountain. But it was not any old mountain. This was the Annaberg (Mount St Anne), which had symbolic significance for the Nazis. At the time of the 1921 Upper Silesian plebiscite it had been the site of a pitched battle between Polish insurgents and German Freikorps: a triumph of heroic German Aryans over Slav subhumans – or so they said. After 1933 Hitler youths were brought to the Annaberg at night to swear fealty to the Führer by the light of burning torches. I have a postcard reproduction of that painting. I think it is the worst painting Neumann ever did. Permission for Teddy to exhibit was restored. He participated in a group exhibition that the Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach visited. Schirach was reputed to be one of the few senior Nazis – perhaps the only one – with ‘cultivated tastes’. Once or twice he had been openly critical of prevailing cultural policies. Obviously he had been briefed about Teddy. ‘May I come to your studio?’ he asked. ‘You don’t only paint such, such shit, do you?’ Von Schirach came and among the decadent paintings hanging around Teddy’s studio he admired a striking portrait of a dark-haired woman – a cubist composition: a wall, a moon, a female head. ‘A 84

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4. ‘A gypsy?’ asked the Nazi youth leader. It was Teddy’s portrait of my mother.

gypsy?’ asked Baldur von Schirach. Teddy avoided a straight answer. He nodded. It was his portrait of my mother. Teddy’s compromise with the Nazis may have contributed to my mother’s outburst that night. But the next night there was a ring at the door. It was Teddy Neumann again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I am simply not willing to accept what you said last night. I have been your friend for many years and I remain your friend. In these terrible times you will need friends. You told me yesterday that you will have to surrender your jewellery, even family heirlooms. Hand them to me. I will get them out of the country for you.’

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SILESIA ‘You’re mad!’ said my mother. ‘I don’t want to be responsible for your ending up in a concentration camp.’ ‘I’ll take my chance,’ he replied. And he did. He smuggled my mother’s jewellery into Holland and handed them to friends in Amsterdam. Teddy was not the only one. My mother’s school friend Tilly Lamberti arrived in Breslau unannounced to offer the same service. She had a brother-in-law in the Gestapo, she told us. She proposed to make an excursion to Holland in the company of her sister and that man. She was sure that when he showed his documents at the border they would not be searched. To me, Teddy Neumann and Tilly Lamberti have always been proof that German and Nazi were not synonymous. So was Frau Klose. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Teddy carried instructions to the Schachnos in Amsterdam to sell my mother’s rings and hold onto the proceeds until we passed through Holland. Not long after there arrived a letter thanking us for having entrusted our two daughters, Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) and Moorchen (Blackie) to them. Such delightful children! The Schachnos had looked into the question of their adoption in Holland but had come to the conclusion that it would make better sense if we were to take them with us to Africa. If we then found we could not afford to maintain them, we could probably find a better class of family to adopt them over there. It did not take my parents long to understand: Little Red Riding Hood was my mother’s red ruby ring. Blackie was her jet surrounded by pearls. When my mother died, 60 years later, that ruby was still on her hand. We were only a few days away from ‘packing day’ when a fellow student on my mother’s dress pattern-making course paid a visit. In the course of conversation she mentioned a Breslau woman who had emigrated to somewhere in Africa ‘wo die Welt mit Brettern vernagelt ist’ (where the world is boarded up with nails). It’s a German idiom meaning ‘the very back of beyond’. Where? asked my mother, ‘Northern Rhodesia!’ We were not exactly enthusiastic about our prospects there. My father had bought a book on South and East Africa. This contained a photograph of the shack of a railway station at Ndola: a stationmaster’s office, a ticket office, and perhaps a storeroom for luggage, all surrounded by a pillared veranda. ‘You see that pillar on the right?’ said my father. ‘We’ll place our suitcase there and sit on it. And wait.’ 86

EXODUS ‘Wait for what?’ He spread out his hands and shrugged his shoulders. Prospects were bleak indeed. I did not see it as a 12-year-old. I see it now. Would my father have to place his new solar topee beside that pillar and play the violin for pennies? Unlikely. The capital we were able to export – given the Nazi’s punitive rate of exchange – was going to be worth £70 or £80. Of course that was worth far more in 1939 than today but one British consular official said sadly ‘Your little capital will soon be eaten up.’ There was another £300, which Uncle Friedrich had had to deposit to obtain our visas, but this would not be released for several years. Anyway, it was not our money. What could this man of 50, a man with a slow reaction time, a nervous tic, a little hard of hearing, a serious-minded, obsessively conscientious man but very set in his ways – what would such a man do to make a living in darkest Africa? He had studied English for several years, but he had always worked by himself. He had refused to join a class or to take a teacher. He spent several hours a day swotting and had acquired an enormous vocabulary. By 1939 he could pick up an unseen English text and translate it off the cuff, but he had hardly ever heard English spoken. When he did, he could not understand. He attributed this to being hard of hearing. A rifle had exploded a few inches from his ear during the First World War and had damaged his eardrums. I think it had more to do with his slow reaction time. A typical expression of his, which he used frequently in Breslau but with ever increasing frequency once we got to Africa, was ‘something must be done about this’ or ‘someone must be responsible for sorting this out’. ‘This’ would become the dangerously inadequate street lighting in our African town or the wartime shortage of textbooks in my school. He had grown up in a highly organized society, an over organized society, where there was always someone clearly responsible for ‘this’ – but in a pioneering country? My mother now seemed, somehow, to grow more confident. ‘Let’s get out of Germany,’ she argued. ‘Everything else will work out somehow.’ She hoped to be able to make a living as a dressmaker. But would there be a demand for dresses? We knew so little about Northern Rhodesia. Perhaps people out there only wore loincloths? My father suffered from insomnia. He tried innumerable remedies suggested by doctors or fellow sufferers. For a while (following a popular journal) he put ice-packed compresses around his midriff every night before going to sleep. It did not work! Curiously, I have no recollection that I suffered from any anxiety, 87

SILESIA not at the conscious level. But around that time I started to chew my fingernails, a bad habit for which I was frequently reprimanded. There was another: daydreaming. Sent to my room to do my homework I would have written a mere two lines in an hour or two. What had I been up to? I would never tell. I had been in a deep reverie – living in a dream world of my own. I was a Red Indian brave and by my feats of heroism defeated the onslaught of the palefaces and when Winnetou, chief of the Apaches, met his heroic death it was I, of course, who was chosen by acclamation to lead the tribe. Maybe I had not lifted a finger to defend myself against that Hitler youth who had beaten me – one blow for each of my relatives. But what did that matter? It was I who flew that plane swooping low over the Nazi’s Nuremberg rally, only a few feet above ground level. Ha! How terrified they looked, those Nazi bigwigs. They shat themselves when I released my load of bombs and wiped out the lot of them. Oh, yes, young Säbel the Hitler youth was among those who perished. But flying so low in death-defying courage, I, too, perished. On subsequent days, reworking the dream (again at the expense of my homework) I survived and this time I was hailed as a national hero and they played Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as I climbed out of my plane. The dream world I lived in was a protection against the real world. But I had other protection: I had grown up as an only child, securely loved by both my parents. I ought to have suffered from angst: neither my father nor my mother were secure personalities. My mother was extremely emotional, often deeply pessimistic and occasionally hysterical. My father always seemed to me, somehow, psychologically frail and in need of protection. Despite all this I had no obvious fears: I was confident ‘we’ would manage. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The packers came and so did the customs official. The packing firm brought 12 large wooden cases. Two of them were ingeniously designed to convert into wardrobes. A third could become a chest to hold sheets and blankets during the day, after our dual-purpose beds had been converted into daytime settees. We were described, abroad, as refugees. Émigrés would have been more accurate. We did not flee by night carrying a few possessions tied in a blanket. The customs officer was not as conscientious as we had feared. My 88

EXODUS parents had provided sandwiches for him and the packers, but at lunchtime he went out for a beer and left the cases unsealed. My mother rushed out and bought a few more items that might, perhaps, have some resale value – a hairdryer, I think, and an electric fan. She hid these in a half-packed case. She no longer bothered to disguise what she was doing from my father. Even he – that strictest and most upright of Prussians – had, I think, come to realize that the moral code that had guided him his 50 years had become an irrelevance. We left Breslau on 16 May 1939. The railway station remained imprinted in my memory: a nineteenth-century façade in imitation of a medieval castle with turrets and crenulations and arched windows. This disguised a steel structure arching over half a dozen platforms. Aunt Hannah stood on the platform, waving her handkerchief. Grandmother Fraenkel had been too distressed to come. We had said our farewells the previous evening. She suffered from leukaemia. My father knew he was unlikely to see her again. The sea did not part as we made our exodus, nor did the waves swallow up pursuing hordes. The ship’s orchestra of the SS Windhuk, Hamburg-Afrika Line, played a sentimental German ditty: Muss i’ denn, muss i’ denn. Must I leave this little town and you, my love, remain behind? My mother wept profusely. I looked up to see whether my father, too, was crying. He was not. If he had, it might have shaken me out of my calm. But he held onto the railings tightly and his teeth were clenched. The land that our ancestors had inhabited for some seven centuries was disappearing from sight. We left Germany threeand-a-half months before the outbreak of war. I, for my part, was excited. Ahead was Africa. Ahead was adventure. I was an explorer: a Livingstone, a Schweinfurth, a Mungo Park. Nostalgia did not come until many years later. We were travelling first class. One could pay for sea voyages in undiscounted German currency. We had a suite – a large cabin for my parents, a small one for me and a lounge between the two. It was our last splurge – on grandmother’s money – before many years of poverty. But it was not a devil-may-care extravagance: it had carefully calculated practical advantages. Under German customs regulations all purchases on board were paid for with special coupons – ‘ship money’. The amount of ‘ship money’ you could buy with undiscounted German currency was limited, but first-class passengers were entitled to more than second-class ones. No doubt it was meant to be spent on champagne, but as the ship steamed up the estuary my father took our entire allowance to the ship’s shop to buy Leica cameras. Customs 89

SILESIA regulations had prevented him from taking more than one such valuable camera out of Germany. He got to the ship’s shop too late. Other passengers had queued up even before the ship had left Hamburg and had bought up the entire stock of Leicas. My father had to make do with two cheaper cameras. Our first port of call was Rotterdam. The older Schachnos came from Amsterdam to meet us. Their two children were at school. Both, they told us proudly, were already quite fluent in Dutch. We envied them: they could remain in Europe and in these wonderful, civilized Netherlands. We had admired the spotless Dutch villages as our boat steamed up the Maas. The Schachnos had started a small business and told us they were not doing badly. If only we had been as astute as they! Not one of them survived the war. Herr Schachno was a short, tubby, rather breathless man. Frau Schachno, however, was tall and stout. As soon as they reached our suite, she pulled a leather pouch from her bosom and handed my mother her rings – Little Red Riding Hood, Blackie and some brooches. From elsewhere around her body she produced a roll of £5 sterling notes. ‘Whatever is that?’ asked my father. The two women laughed conspiratorially. My mother had secretly managed to smuggle out a small sum, but perhaps enough to save us from starvation for a few weeks. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ There were over half a million Jews in Germany when Hitler came to power. When war broke out, less than seven years later, three-fifths had emigrated. The two-fifths who remained behind were the old, the sick, the poor and those who were unlucky: a promised visa had not arrived in time or an ailing relative had delayed their departure. They were trapped when the gates clanked shut and were murdered. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ We were lucky and survived. Moreover, we survived without too much damage to our souls. Many others never recovered from the disruption of their lives and lived crippled, stunted lives. One friend of my family – he had been a good lawyer I am told – was last heard of as a night watchman in Argentina. One ambitious medical student, prevented from completing his studies, became a hairdresser and hated it. 90

EXODUS Cousin Benno, aged 13, was sent to England on a Kindertransport. So was my London flatmate of later years David Smollett. I too was registered for that migration of children – as a precaution. Fortunately, no serious hitch arose over my parents’ emigration. Neither David nor Benno ever saw their parents again. Both were placed with Gentile working-class families who were paid a modest sum by a Jewish aid organization. Both boys were left to cope, with little support. Benno, at not quite 15, had to go to work in a shoe factory in Northampton. David was expected to do similarly in Manchester. He was, however, a more aggressive character than my cousin. He was determined to get an education. He went to see a rabbi and demanded help. The rabbi had only one suggestion: he could offer a scholarship for a rabbinical seminary if David wanted to become a rabbi. David was totally irreligious. At least he was when I knew him in later years, but he agreed at once: yes, it was his life’s ambition to become a rabbi! The second Sabbath after starting his course he sneaked out to the cinema. His rabbinical career came to an abrupt end! He did eventually get a university education, but that was after military service in the British army on an ex-serviceman’s grant. He became – for a while at least – a highly successful civil engineer. I only got to know him many years after all this. We shared a cottage in Hampstead. It took me some time to realize how disturbed he was. He had never recovered from the murder of his parents. He moved under three different pseudonyms – Smollet, Delaney and Hogarth, having long discarded his real family name. For each of his pseudonyms he had created a fictitious life story. Different circles of friends had totally different ideas as to who he was. In one persona he pretended to be a South African. He was then pursuing a young woman of Afrikaner origin. He was very talented linguistically and spent two weekends learning Afrikaans, occasionally consulting me about pronunciation. By the second Sunday he spoke Afrikaans quite adequately. He even memorized the town plan of Pretoria and invented addresses where he claimed to have lived. Apparently, he managed to convince her. His relationships with women were exceedingly difficult. He pursued them with hungry longing but fled soon after he had bedded one. Then it was left to me, his flatmate, to engage his woman in doorstep conversation while he climbed out through our back window. Was he so terrified of emotional attachments? Some time in the late 1950s my parents came to London for a visit. They were sitting in my car outside a clinic while I went inside to 91

SILESIA make a medical appointment for my mother. They had not yet met David but he, recognizing my car, realized who the passengers were. He thrust his head in through the window and yelled the Nazi slogan ‘Juden raus!’ Out with the Jews! My parents were very shaken. He thought it funny. Or did he? At the age of 35 or so he died in odd circumstances. He fell off Mount Snowdon. I suspected suicide. His then girlfriend – it was to escape her that he had gone mountaineering – was so suspicious that she insisted on having the coffin opened. She must have thought death might be another of his bizarre jokes. I shared her doubts: at the funeral service I sneaked a quick look around the chapel: could he be sitting in the back, grinning in that twisted way that he had? And then there was Heinrich Graetz – my mother’s cousin. He was a descendant of the Jewish historian of the same name, the one who had employed my little grandfather as his scribe. In fact, Heinrich II was related to Heinrich I through both parents, his mother having married a cousin. He studied pharmacology. While a student this painfully timid man had found the courage to march into the Army High Command in Breslau and to request permission to use their library. Permission was granted and for years Heinrich studied military strategy. He traced maps of the battles of great generals from Frederick the Great to von Hindenburg, perhaps also those of the Australian general Sir John Monash, who was his mother’s first cousin? What great battles did he command in his imagination? He qualified as a pharmacist in 1929 and worked in a provincial Silesian town. After 1937, as a Jew, he was banned from practising. He emigrated to the United States, but his foreign qualifications were not recognized and he eked out a living as an ill-paid clerk. He was a painfully shy and withdrawn bachelor; ‘a turtle of a man’ is how his nephew, my cousin Benno described him. He lived in a room rented in a widow’s house and spent his leisure hours in public libraries reading and writing. No one knew what research he was doing. When he died Benno found he had spent his lonely years totally pointlessly drawing up lists (five notebooks full) of the British peerage, the German nobility from 1740 and the Austrian nobility from 1800. He too was a victim of the times. Others – the majority I think – adapted and survived, often in astonishing ways. My mother’s childhood friend Annie Hirsch and her husband took refuge in Italy. They were waiting for visas for Palestine. They had taken courses in Hebrew but not in Italian. They opened a food ‘automat’ in Milan. To be precise, it purported to be an automatic 92

EXODUS dispenser and displayed pictures of various snacks. When a hungry customer inserted his lira and pressed, say, button 3 for ‘panini con prosciutto’ the machine took a little time to dispense this. Why so slow? Because, hidden behind the façade, sat Annie who quickly prepared the required roll and slid it into the ‘machine’. If she ran short of prosciutto her husband rushed out to buy some around the corner. In this way very few of their precious lira were tied up in stock. Uncle Friedrich left as early as 1933. His training in German law was useless to him in South Africa. But he had always been interested in chemistry. He set up a small factory and throughout the war years produced ‘ersatz’ chemical products for whatever was in short supply: soap, lipstick, toothpaste, even a dye that simulated silk stockings. His ingenuity was astonishing. But problems arose whenever the genuine article – real silk stockings or familiar brands of toothpaste – reappeared on the market. Friedrich was then left with stock that could not be sold; several years after the war his garage was still full of soft soap, which the family gradually used up in the washing machine. He did badly financially while he remained a chemical manufacturer and, after the war, found himself compelled to return to the law. He set up a German law practice in South Africa handling, in particular, compensation claims from victims of Nazism. At this he did far better. One of my mother’s cousins, Elfriede, emigrated to Italy early. Having been the private secretary to the social democratic prefect of Silesia she was in some danger. She worked as a maid in a wealthy household but she had to fight off the advances of her employer. She qualified as an interpreter and eventually became an organizer of international conferences. In 1936 she married a young Italian Jewish physicist. When Mussolini turned against the Jews the young couple emigrated to the USA. In later years Grandmother Sophie proudly displayed her niece’s photograph on the mantelpiece of her one-room apartment in Johannesburg. Elfriede was marching into dinner on the arm of the King of Sweden. Her husband, Emilio Segré, had just been awarded the Nobel prize for work in experimental nuclear physics. That was the second Nobel laureate in our family, grandmother announced proudly. She had had no reservations whatsoever about her cousin Fritz Haber’s role in the poison gas campaign in the First World War. Similarly, she had no problems with Segré’s role in the Second World War: he is credited with an important part in the building of the first atomic bomb. Among our wide circle of Jewish friends and relatives only one survived the war in Germany. This was my mother’s cousin Edith. She 93

SILESIA had married a non-Jew, head of a teacher-training seminar, Peter Schirbel. Shortly after the Nazi takeover he was told that if he wanted to keep his post he would have to divorce his wife. He refused and was dismissed. He eked out a living on a reduced pension supplemented by giving private lessons. The Schirbels had a difficult war. She was drafted for compulsory labour to wash down railway carriages in a shunting yard. As the wife of a Gentile she was, in theory, not liable to what was called ‘resettlement in the east’. There were, however, no guarantees that she might not be picked up by an over-zealous SS patrol to make up for a shortfall in that day’s quota. To forestall this, her husband met her each and every day at the end of her shift and walked her home. During the Allied 1000-bomber raids of Berlin, the Schirbels abandoned their apartment. It was pulverized not long after. They rented a room in a village on the outskirts where they felt safer. Many bombed-out people dossed down in such places. Her Jewish origin did not attract attention. As the wife of a Gentile, Edith did not have to wear the Star of David. She could accompany her husband into air-raid shelters during bombing raids. Once, when they returned to their room after the ‘all clear’ they were dismayed to find that their small store of rationed food had disappeared. They believed the thief was their landlord, but they did not dare accuse him. Perhaps he suspected Edith’s race and would denounce her? Edith is the only one of my relatives who remained in Germany and managed to survive. Some years after the end of the war, when I had at last managed to overcome my reluctance to visit Germany, I sought them out. He was by then director of the teacher-training faculty of a university. He was also chairman of a state commission for new schoolbooks. He was striving to introduce honest textbooks of contemporary history into the secondary school curriculum of his state and was very bitter about the obstruction he was encountering. He seemed to me a person of rare integrity but there was one thing about him that perturbed me: his fiercely antagonistic attitude to all things German. Even his light reading was in languages other than German, mainly in English. ‘Germans,’ he told me, ‘are the world’s worst hypocrites. They try to deny all knowledge of Hitler’s crimes. Liars, the lot of them! Scum!’ ‘But Peter,’ I protested, ‘You are a German yourself.’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘shouldn’t every man look with a critical eye at his own people?’ Could a man so hostile to his own nation guide the education of their young? Could he ever win acceptance for his view of history among the next generation? 94

EXODUS ‘You are young and you have lived abroad. If you had seen as much meanness of spirit, hypocrisy, vulgarity, coarseness as we have, Edith and I,’ and he shrugged his shoulders and stopped. He opened a bottle of excellent wine and pointed out that his antagonism did not extend to German wines. I accepted with pleasure. He turned to his wife: ‘At long last a family member who enjoys a drink!’ He raised his glass: ‘To that family feeling.’ We clinked glasses. I felt closer to him than to most of my blood relatives. Some years later I heard news that made me go to Germany again: Peter was dying of cancer. In his hospital room he and his wife chatted about future travel. Next year they might visit England. The moment she was out of the room he dropped this pretence: ‘Edith thinks I do not know what is the matter with me. Well, no doubt it’s better that way.’ He faced his death with the same dignity that he had displayed in those testing years of the Nazis. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Two relatives did get out of Germany well after mass murder had started: my father’s sister Hannah and her son, my cousin Klaus. Four transports of 1000 each had already gone from Breslau to their death. Klaus was, so far as he knows, the last Volljude – 100 per cent Jew – to get out of Breslau legally and survive. What follows is a summary of Klaus’s own memoirs.* In America, Klaus renamed himself Kenneth. His family call him Ken and I shall follow their example from now on. Ken’s father died of a heart attack in 1937. He was 53. He had – according to my own father – been a brilliant lawyer. He had long talked about emigrating. He spoke French and English and thought that abroad he might make a living as a hotel receptionist. He had, however, done nothing but talk about it. ‘How can I,’ he justified himself to my father, ‘with that wife!’ He complained that Hannah, my father’s sister, had no marketable skills and was making no efforts to acquire any. She was, he grumbled, concerned with nothing but her looks and her clothes. My mother confirmed his criticism. Hannah was a tall handsome lady, always dressed with impeccable taste. Her tastes were expensive. On her husband’s death Hannah found herself a wealthy woman: his personal wealth plus some insurance policies amounted to a tidy sum. She decided that her best strategy was to find a second husband who would be able to * The Ken Markiewitz Story, unpublished manuscript, Wilmington, Delaware.

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SILESIA get her and her son out of Germany. She visited a marriage broker who specialized in matching wealthy Jewesses with foreign men. It was to be a purely commercial transaction: the foreigners married for money, but undertook to get their wives out of Germany. Men of various European nationalities were on offer. Hannah was shrewd enough to insist on an American. In 1940 she was introduced to a Mr Carl born in Ohio, a Gentile of German ancestry. He had come back to Europe and settled in Germany in the years of the depression. He had, according to my cousin, squandered his inheritance, owed taxes and was, at that stage, reduced to running a small business in Berlin. With Hannah’s money he hoped to buy the rights to some German patents, exploit them in the USA and become rich. The USA was still at peace with Germany. Emigration was possible. German U-boats in the Atlantic did not normally torpedo neutral ships. Hannah married Carl in September 1940. Under German law she was now American. At a stroke she was freed from restrictions imposed on Jews. Previously, she had only been allowed to withdraw strictly limited amounts from her bank accounts. Now her funds were unblocked. A far more generous ‘Aryan’ card replaced her ration card stamped ‘Jew’. Her radio had been confiscated. She made no attempt to claim it back. She bought a new one. The newly married couple appeared to like each other. What was meant to be a fictitious marriage became a real one. This created tension between Ken and his mother; under a provision of his father’s will a quarter of the inheritance was to go to Ken if his mother remarried. He was a minor and a guardian was appointed to represent his interests. Mr Carl offered to adopt Ken, but my cousin suspected that the man was after his money. Moreover, he was determined to retain his father’s name. Of course, adoption would have had great advantages. Ken would have been recognized as an American – at least under German law – and could have left Germany without fuss. Ken refused. ‘What happened later, the Holocaust, never even entered into our imagination,’ he writes in his memoirs. The first mass shooting of Breslau Jews (the gas chambers had not yet been built) only occurred 14 months later. I quote him again: My mother and I became plainly hostile to each other. She wanted me out of the house. She had me eat out in a small Jewish dining room because she wasn’t going to go to the stores with a ration book marked JEW. Jewish ration books were only accepted in a very limited number of stores and only during certain hours: in 1941 only between 11.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m. 96

EXODUS Late in 1940 Ken’s Jewish school – my own old school – was ordered to vacate its premises. The authorities claimed they required the building. For some months the school continued to operate from the offices of the Jewish community, but only in the afternoons. In June 1941 all Jewish higher education beyond the age of 14 was banned. For some time teaching continued secretly in private homes, but not for long. Ken describes the relations between teachers and pupils as extremely close; the motivation of the teachers remained undiminished. There were by then only 14 in his class. Two years earlier, in my days, we had been 60 or so in two parallel classes. Ken relates how one day, standing around and chatting, someone asked Frau Foerder, the German literature teacher: ‘Why do you continue teaching us? The situation is hopeless.’ She replied: ‘As long as one of you survives, it will have been worthwhile.’ Then came Pearl Harbour. Germany declared war on the United States. In the USA suspected German agents were arrested. The Germans retaliated and arrested an equal number of Americans. They came for Mr Carl but he was out of town, attending to his business in Berlin, so they took Aunt Hannah instead. I don’t think she had more than a few words of English at that time, but, according to German law, she was an American. The genuine, Ohio-born Mr Carl remained at liberty. Hannah passed through seven different gaols over several months. Later she offered to write a consumer’s guide to German gaols! Around that time news reached Breslau of deportations of Jews from other towns, for ‘resettlement in the east’. Rumours made this ‘resettlement’ sound far more ominous. But the murder industry was not yet fully operational. From August 1941 onwards, older Jews were slowly moved out of Breslau, first to sites within a short distance of the city, such as a monastery vacated by the Cistercian order. From there they disappeared. Grandmother Fraenkel escaped this fate, but only just. She died a few weeks before her old age home was evacuated. On 21 November 1941 – with two hours’ notice – 1000 Breslau Jews were ordered to assemble for deportation. Fifty committed suicide. Another 50 were seized to fill the quota. All of Breslau’s Jewish gravediggers were among the first thousand, so the Jewish community asked the remaining youngsters – Ken among them – to bury the dead. They did. His memoirs do not describe this in any detail. For a 14-year-old it must have been a traumatic ordeal. That first transport went, in cattle trucks, to Kaunas/Kovno/Kauen (depending on your ethnic claims) in Lithuania. They were marched 97

SILESIA to Fort No. 9, outside the town. According to evidence given at the Eichmann trial, they were held in ice-cold underground bunkers for three days and nights without food or water. They were then ordered to strip, taken to ready prepared pits and shot. Nazi records, discovered after the war, are brief but precise: ‘29.11.41 Kauen-F. – 693 Juden, 1155 Jüdinn., 152 J.-Kind. 2,000 (Umsiedler aus Wien u. Breslau).’ ‘Umsiedler’ means resettlers. Among those ‘152 J-Kind’ ‘resettled’ I remember two very pretty, vivacious girls who were in my class. I still have an old photograph. They look at the camera, for all eternity, with jaunty amusement. They were 14 when they died. Among the ‘1155 Jüdinn.’ was Frau Schüller, my first English teacher and that splendid lady, Frau Foerder, who told her class ‘As long as one of you survives, it will have been worthwhile.’ Four transports, each of about 1000, left Breslau while Ken was still in the city. Early groups were shot. Later ones were disposed of by more sophisticated methods. Ken relates that someone told him that a train bringing Jews from the west traversed Breslau but for some reason had to stop on an overpass in the very heart of the city. People locked in cattle trucks – God knows how many days they had been in those trucks – screamed for water. No one brought any. Not one single German had the courage to do so. I well remember that overpass. The trams into the city went beneath it. My little grandfather must have passed it whenever he went to the law courts. My father’s journey to his office crossed under it. I myself travelled that way every week, going to the gym that failed to make an athlete of me: a familiar, unremarkable site had become a place of death. In April 1942 Ken was drafted for forced labour. He was not quite 15. He was sent to work in a toilet paper factory half an hour’s train journey from Breslau. In the beginning he could travel to the station by tram. Later Jews were banned from using trams. There was no circumventing this since by then it had become compulsory to display the yellow Star of David. Each day he had to walk two miles to the station and back. His train journey took an hour and a half each way. After that came eight hours of heavy work, six days a week. The trains were widely spaced and the only suitable one in the morning reached the factory at 5.20 a.m., 40 minutes before starting time; this meant getting up before 4.00 a.m. The child workers had to provide their own food from their ration allowance. Ken’s weekly rations included 98

EXODUS nine ounces of meat, four and a half ounces of butter, two ounces of fat. It was more generous in bread – four pounds six ounces. Jews over the age of 14 received no fresh vegetables, fruit, or milk. Ken says he could survive on this ration until he had to do hard physical labour. After that it became inadequate. ‘I was terribly underweight, my teeth were loose and I was extremely pale. I felt myself getting weaker and ever hungrier.’ He describes temporary loss of eyesight – apparently, a typical symptom of hunger. His ‘American’ mother was in prison somewhere in West Germany. Her husband, Mr Carl, spent long periods away in Berlin. Ken, alone in the family’s large flat, cooked himself a week’s supply of barley soup at a time and carried one jar to work each day. Two Catholic spinsters who ran the local bakery sometimes slipped him a day-old loaf of bread. At other times they allowed him to use his bread ration stamps before they became due. This was dangerous: by May 1942 he was three weeks ahead in consuming his bread ration. He knew that he was facing disaster. But weren’t deportation and murder looming anyway? One day, out of the blue, there arrived a letter from the Swiss embassy in Berlin addressed to Mr Carl. The neutral Swiss then represented US interests in Germany. The letter said that US citizens in Germany were to be exchanged for an equal number of German citizens from the United States. It urged Carl to join the exchange. His wife, in prison somewhere in the west of Germany, would be allowed to join him. Ken, too, was included in the offer. Four weeks later the three arrived in Lisbon. In Lisbon there was a hitch. Since Ken was not Carl’s son the US consulate would not permit him to board the neutral Swedish ship. Arrangements were made to leave him with a family in Lisbon. However, three hours before the ship was due to leave he was granted a six months visitor’s visa for the USA. ‘I was in a daze with it all. I was positively the last Jew to leave Breslau in a “legal” manner.’ Hannah had pulled it off! Martin, her first husband, had thought her too incompetent for emigration. In the USA she separated from Mr Carl. He had become hostile and bitter: instead of marrying into a fortune, he had found himself with a penniless woman. In New York Hannah worked as a housemaid and cook. She and her son survived. The remainder of Breslau’s Jews, the third largest community in Germany, was murdered. According to Ken, not one single pure blooded Jew succeeded in saving himself by hiding in Breslau. One single one of our classmates did survive but he was of mixed race. It 99

SILESIA was through him that I learnt, 50 years later, that the last or the second last transport to the gas chambers – to Belsec, Treblinka, Sobibor or Auschwitz, he was not certain of its destination – included Walter Ahrends, the brilliant young pianist who had taught me musical notation. His family had failed to get to Argentina in time. For many long years I had imagined a reunion with him in London, in the dressing rooms of the Royal Festival Hall after a virtuoso performance, when the applause had subsided. I have read many painful accounts of Nazi atrocities. Few have caused me more anguish that this: to know this boy murdered at the age of 14, his talent – perhaps genius – reduced to ashes blowing in the wind. Comment dois-je célébrer ta mort Comment puis-je suivre tes obsèques Poignée de cendres vagabonde Entre la terre et le ciel? (M. Jaztrun)

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PART II

Rhodesia

Chapter 5

Where you die of hunger doesn’t make much difference, does it? The border between Southern and Northern Rhodesia is, so far as I know, the most awesome in the world. Our train whistled twice – long, plaintive whistles – and slowed down to a walking pace. The passengers left their compartments. I followed. We crowded on the open balcony-like ends of the carriages. I heard a deep, rumbling sound. An elderly man by my side pointed to a low column of cloud ahead and said something in English, which I did not understand. What he may have said was ‘the Smoke that Thunders’. We crossed a bridge over a sheer, deep ravine and there, in front of us, were the turbulent white waters of the largest waterfall on earth. From the train we saw only a segment of its expanse, but quite enough to amaze. I have seen these falls many times since. They never fail to inspire the same awe. What made the scene even more striking was the contrast. For two long, boring days our train had chugged through dull, flat lands where most of the vegetation had dried to a dusty khaki. We had skirted the Kalahari where only thorn trees thrive. Now, suddenly, we were in lush green tropical forest. The pillar of cloud – could the column that guided the Children of Israel through the Sinai have looked like that? – was spray thrust up by the Zambezi as it dashed against the rocks of the deep. The cloud fell back to earth in a fine spray. Where it did so, lush vegetation proliferated – vegetation unlike anything for hundreds of miles around. It was like an island of Amazonian forest in the midst of a parched land. The first European to describe these falls was David Livingstone (no, he was not the discoverer, whatever my future schoolbooks were to say; the locals always knew about them). Livingstone wrote that ‘scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.’ He renamed the falls after Queen Victoria, a name far less poetic than the indigenous Mosy-oa-tunya, the Smoke that Thunders. In 103

RHODESIA mitigation, Livingstone did write later that it was the only time he gave an English name to an African site. Scenically the rest of Northern Rhodesia – a country three times the size of the United Kingdom – was to prove an anticlimax after this. Our train stopped at the little town named after Livingstone. The station was a run-down three-room building, much like that photograph of a station my father had found in his guidebook: it had the same pillared veranda against which, he had suggested, we would sit and wait – wait for what? Unlike that photograph, however, this station platform was crowded. Strictly speaking, it was not a platform at all; one descended three steps from the carriages to the baked earth of Africa. Black porters in khaki shorts and torn shirts were rushing about carrying suitcases on their heads. Other black men were offering carvings for sale. They were boisterous and cheerful, unlike the group of Europeans standing around. Most whites there (as I found out in later years) found life unrelievedly dull. One of the few breaks occurred three times a week when the mail train arrived. The train stopped for immigration formalities. This gave them a chance to meet acquaintances passing through and to catch up with the latest gossip. Of course there were other trains, but they only transported goods – and blacks. But in that country, at that time, blacks did not count. Nor had they even been counted. The town of Livingstone, we had learnt from the said guidebook, had a population of 1200. That happened to exclude ten times that number of Africans. Or perhaps was it 20 times that number? Among the whites idling around someone spotted our Berlin-style solar topees, or perhaps overheard us speaking German. He introduced himself: Herr Gerson. He had arrived from Germany a few weeks earlier. My parents pounced on him for advice: we had tickets to Ndola, a further 24 hours’ journey northwards. Should we get off at Livingstone? Or go halfway, to the capital, Lusaka? Or all the way to Ndola? Where did he think one had the best prospects? Gerson shrugged his shoulders: ‘Where you die of hunger doesn’t make much difference, does it?’ He did, however, impart the information that there was a Jewish community in Livingstone and that they had formed a committee to help and advise ‘refugees’. ‘What they’ll tell you is to settle anywhere at all, so long as it isn’t at Livingstone. They’re dead scared of commercial competition.’ But in case we wanted to look around, there was a cheap boarding house, the Mainway Hotel. He was staying there himself and he knew they had one or two rooms unoccupied. ‘But 104

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER make sure they give you mosquito nets without holes. There’s a lot of malaria about!’ It was my mother who made the snap decision: We get off here, at least for a few days of exploration. The Jewish community’s committee called a meeting of the ‘newcomers’ the following day. I was sent to play but I heard about it later, many times over. It had taken place in the house of one of the ‘Litvaks’ – Jews of Lithuanian origin. A Mrs Kopelowitz had addressed the little gathering of four or five families. To her credit she did not advise them to leave Livingstone. She said she had heard there was no accommodation in Lusaka. On the other hand she said economic prospects in Livingstone were poor. In this she was right. Livingstone had once been the administrative capital of Northern Rhodesia, but in 1935 the capital had been moved to Lusaka, to the healthier, drier uplands. By the time we arrived Livingstone was run-down and economically depressed. A few government departments still remained but as new offices were built at Lusaka they, too, would be moved. The remaining government buildings in Livingstone were derelict. Termites were gnawing at their wooden pillars and rust was eating away at the corrugated iron roofs. Mrs Kopelowitz launched into a lecture that came to be bitterly resented. We newcomers, she said, should not be too demanding. The Johannesburg Refugee Assistance Committee had set up a boarding house and a farm outside Lusaka, for our benefit. Earlier arrivals from Germany had created a very bad impression with their grumbles and complaints and demands. Believe it or not, they had complained because no wardrobes had been provided. ‘Wardrobes they want. Wardrobes!’ Her tone – as my father often re-enacted it in later years – had made it sound as if these impertinent Huns had demanded champagne and caviar for breakfast. Someone protested that many among us had saved nothing from Germany but their clothes. Was it unreasonable to want to safeguard them? Mrs K turned on the protester: when they – the ‘Litvaks’ – had come into these parts the railway had not yet been built. They had trekked up in ox-wagons and had slept under them. They had braved bushfires and wild animals. Lions and hyenas had kept them awake at night. No refugee assistance committee had been there to mollycoddle them. But they had had the pioneering spirit. ‘Wardrobes!’ Writing some 60 years later I have some sympathy for the lady. Perhaps her tirade was peppered by some of the resentment that many Ostjuden felt about the pretensions of their urbane German coreligionists; but, she was right, we were not pioneer material. 105

RHODESIA After a few depressing days in that rundown dump, the Mainway Hotel, we took the train to Lusaka. My mother, despite her inadequate English, had made a phone call and had learnt that there was accommodation available in the boarding house that the Refugee Assistance Committee had established. We slept badly that first night in Lusaka. Even I did. My mother was sobbing much of the night. So was Mrs Caminer on the other side of the room. Das Boardinghaus, as it was known in ‘Germlish’, was overcrowded. The manager had wanted to bed us down in male and female dormitories. My parents did not want to be separated; neither did the Caminers. We had made friends with them on the SS Windhuk. The manager said that if our two families were willing to share one room, he would rig up a dividing curtain to provide a little privacy. Both families agreed. There were not enough beds and I slept on a mattress on the floor. It was surprisingly cold. I had not expected that in central Africa. The curtain the manager provided consisted of two double sheets, so our families were hidden from sight of the others, but not from sound. Whether it was my mother’s weeping that had set off Mrs Caminer (as she claimed) or vice versa (as my mother claimed) I do not know. The room had a window opening onto a gauzed-in veranda, where a third recently arrived family, the Wiesenbachers, were quartered. Before long Mrs Wiesenbacher and her nubile 16-year-old daughter had joined in the all-night sobbing. They kept me awake some of the night. Even my excitement at discovering new worlds was starting to drain away. There was much to sob about. The town was depressing, das Boardinghaus was primitive – there were certainly no wardrobes – and, by first accounts, economic prospects in Lusaka were extremely poor. (It was not a good beginning. But looking back in later years my mother – by then over 90 – was able to say that her 28 years in Lusaka had been the happiest and most fulfilling of her life.) We went for a late breakfast that first morning. There was a large room with three rough wooden tables. Some men were playing cards at the end of one of the tables. I looked around, puzzled. Where was the breakfast room? Surely this was – what? – the servants’ quarter? I had never before eaten at a table without a tablecloth. I had indeed led a sheltered life, very sheltered, Nazis notwithstanding. The chairman of the local Jewish community, a kindly rotund man named ‘Tubby’ Wulfsohn dropped in later that day and advised us to move to the farm at Lilayi, an hour or so outside Lusaka. The Johannesburg-based Refugee Assistance Committee had leased it on 106

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER advice that there was a great future in agriculture in Northern Rhodesia. With the copper mines reopening because of the prospects of war, there would be a demand for farm produce far greater than the territory could then supply. Wulfsohn said he would drive us out to Lilayi in a day or two and we could see for ourselves. Among the residents at the boarding house there were a number of Hessische Landjuden – village Jews from the state of Hessen in the west of Germany. They were regarded with some disdain by the urban and more urbane, my parents included. They were a type unfamiliar to us. They had been cattle dealers, or butchers, or small village shopkeepers. One was a rather villainous looking man and it was whispered that he had been a horse thief. Several agreed to move to the farm and to try their hand at cattle rearing. Among them was the alleged horse thief. He was one of the very few who did eventually become a farmer. In time he acquired a reputation for integrity and religiosity, despite his looks. Most of the others struggled on in town. Goebbels, in his diaries, reports an early conversation with Hitler on the future of the Jews. ‘By preference he would like to settle them all, not in Siberia where they would be toughened, but in central Africa … in a climate that would weaken them and their resistance.’ Had Hitler never heard of the vigorous cultures that flourished in hot climates? Did the Führer imagine my parents snoozing, propped up against those station pillars, with sombreros pulled over their faces? On the very first morning in Lusaka – despite their lack of sleep – my parents and the Caminers set out and visited the more prominent Jews in the town. There were some 40 families of Lithuanian origin, with a sprinkling of Latvians. They asked advice on where to find accommodation, jobs or opportunities for self-employment. There was already an understanding of sorts between the Caminers and the Fraenkels that they would try to work in partnership. They seemed ‘our sort’ of people. I suppose that meant they were middle-class. However, to our surprise and delight, my father was offered a job within a few days. He was to join a three-man band and play the violin most afternoons and every Saturday night at the Lusaka Hotel. Since our packing cases were still in Beira, he had to borrow a violin. When he was not playing he was to act as the hotel’s relief receptionist. Alas, he was fired at the end of his first week. His musical gifts may have come up to the modest standards of the hotel, but his comprehension of English did not. Mr Wulfsohn, among a number of suggestions, had mentioned that 107

RHODESIA Lusaka needed a dry-cleaning establishment and perhaps a laundry. There was already one such business in town, but it had a bad reputation. A Gujarati Indian whose skills were not admired ran it: clothes were returned with buttons missing, limp and shrunk. That was the beginning of Rhodesian Dry Cleaners. One dawn, nearly 60 years later, in the Indian holy city of Varanasi (or Benares) I stood at the banks of the sacred River Ganges below the grand but deserted palaces of Indian noblemen. Suddenly it dawned on me why there had been a niche for Fraenkel and Caminer in Lusaka all those decades earlier. I saw the dhobi-wallahs whipping clothes with fanatical fury against rocks in the river. Few buttons could have survived that treatment. Few clothes would not shrink or go limp. But to come back to Lusaka: Mr Wulfsohn further told us that he had heard that in the nearby mining town of Broken Hill there was a Romanian dry cleaner. For a fee, this man might agree to impart the skills of his trade to Fraenkel and Caminer. A day or two later the two men took the train to Broken Hill and negotiated a deal. The Romanian offered to provide board and lodging as well. The latter consisted of two mattresses placed on the floor of his shop. The two men came back to collect their clothes and toothbrushes. My mother was worried: Would my far-from-robust father be able to take this? He shrugged. He’d slept on straw in Flanders in the Great War. He had spent one entire Lithuanian winter – when the war had virtually stopped because of the fierce cold – sleeping on a Russian-style oven with nothing but his greatcoat beneath him. Outside the cold had been so severe that his mates told him to take great care lest his penis got frostbitten when he left the izba to relieve himself. A mattress on a central African floor – that would be luxury by comparison! Was my father developing the pioneering spirit that Mrs Kopelowitz had called for? Neither he nor his partner was, however, prepared for the board provided. The Romanian lived on boiled potatoes and butter – and that is what he served his lodgers for lunch and for dinner – nothing else. They went out and bought themselves oranges. They had arranged to stay a month but the two men came back ten days later. They had learnt everything the Romanian could teach them, they said. Their tutor, too, had acquired his skills in a week or two from a Hungarian. They felt that with the aid of a good book on stain removal (which Uncle Friedrich had promised to obtain in Johannesburg) they would manage. In the meantime their wives had found a house that could, with a bit of ingenuity, serve as both living quarters and works. Built around 1903, which is before the railway reached these highlands, it was in 108

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER fact the oldest burnt-brick house in Lusaka. Some of its surprising fittings must have been brought up by ox-wagon. Someone who was familiar with the climate of the Transvaal highveld but not with Northern Rhodesia must have built the house, for the verandas were not gauzed. On the other hand, there were open fireplaces in each room: cast iron framing Victorian tiles showing Grecian urns surrounded by garlands of flowers. The fireplaces were never used in the years we inhabited the house. On the rare cold days of winter a onebar electric fire was quite sufficient. On the other hand, the open verandas could not be used after dusk because of mosquitoes – not until we could afford to have gauze fixed. The ceilings must have been shipped out from England. They were made of metal, embossed with elaborate repetitive Victorian patterns. During my first bout of malaria, some months later, I lay in bed tracing that pattern on the bed sheet with my finger. There was something hypnotic about it. Dry-cleaning techniques were primitive: a 44-gallon barrel of cleaning benzene was ordered. Clothes were rinsed in this solvent, by hand, in a small basin. Much of the benzene was lost by evaporation, but what remained was funnelled back into jars and left for the dirt to settle. The clean benzene was then poured into another container and reused. Soon after ‘Rhodesian Dry Cleaners’ had opened, a customer collecting his sports jacket complimented my father: he had had the same jacket cleaned twice while on vacation in England, but certain stains had remained. Caminer and Fraenkel had made them disappear. My father smiled and murmured something about ‘continental expertise’. In fact, this triumph was due to the very first lesson the two had learnt from their Romanian tutor: the efficacy of soap, water and a large scrubbing brush. Most clothes respond well to such rough treatment. However, one has to know which materials can take it and which cannot. If a garment went limp it was stiffened by being dipped into a solution of water and gum arabic – a common adhesive at that time. It was then hung out to dry before ironing. Neither Caminer nor Fraenkel had ever held an electric iron in their hands, except perhaps during army service, but the Romanian had given them some lessons. My father now spent many hours a day standing at an ironing board and became quite proficient. Unfortunately, there were some disasters: a taffeta evening dress shrank to what a later age would call a miniskirt. The ‘continental experts’ had to pay compensation. It ate up much of their first month’s earnings, but they soon learnt to avoid such disasters. In the early days my father’s share of the monthly profits came to £5. It rose gradually to £7 or £8. Though we lived extremely frugally, 109

RHODESIA this was not enough to support a family of three living something resembling a European lifestyle. My ever-anxious father worked out at the end of each month how long it would take before our small capital was exhausted and the dire fate predicted to us on Livingstone station would overtake us. Why, then, did we keep a servant who earned 15 shillings a month (75p) and received a weekly ration of 14 pounds of maize meal and three pennies (now just over one pence) worth of ‘boys’ meat’? It was because water had to be pumped up from a nearby well and carried in buckets into the house. Firewood had to be chopped in the backyard and a wood fire kept going in the kitchen grate. These activities required several hours of physical labour each day. If my parents had been capable of doing such tasks, it would have had to be at the expense of time spent more profitably on dry-cleaning and sewing. Several months after launching ‘Rhodesian Dry Cleaners’ my father found that, for the first time, he did not have to go to the bank to draw on our reserves. We were happy. So were the Caminers. In those early months relations between the two families were good. Later they deteriorated badly. The five of us sang together. What we sang that evening was an ancient German song of the millers’ guild. It tells of journeymen who travel from watermill to watermill, learning new skills from master millers: never still, ever moving like the brook that turns the millstone, that joins the river that flows to the distant sea: ‘Vom Wasser haben wir’s gelernt.’ ‘We learnt it from the water, the water, the wa-a-a-ter.’ Lusaka responded well to the not-so-dry-cleaners. One English JP and accountant, a Mr Teagle, had taken a liking to my father. Perhaps he sympathized with the fate of this doctor of law behind the ironing board. Teagle toured around his acquaintances, collected clothes and arrived with armloads for Dad to clean. For the first year or so, my father had a certain status in the Jewish community. With the exception of one GP he was, I think, the only member with a university education. I find this surprising because standards of education among German Jews were very high. My father was co-opted as a newcomers’ representative on the congregation committee. This did not last. He communicated badly in English. Despite his sophisticated vocabulary and the ease with which he read and translated written matter, he had difficulty understanding spoken English. Very soon others were communicating far better. His participation in committee discussions was considered inadequate and he was replaced. He said he did not mind. I was not so certain. Some of his acquaintances still addressed 110

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER him as ‘Dr Fraenkel’ – but that, too, dropped out of use. Other newcomers did financially better than he and in that community status was measured by commercial success. Doctorates had become an irrelevance. The business did expand a little. A hotel offered them a contract to wash the hotel laundry. ‘Rhodesian Dry Cleaners’ came to employ a staff of five or six Africans. My father and his partner still did much of the cleaning themselves, but laundry and ironing came to be handled by their employees. Earnings remained modest and we lived simply. No clothes were bought for many years and it was well over ten years before my parents could afford their first holiday. One day, my father came back from the hotel upset. He had gone with one of his ‘boys’ to collect sheets, pillowcases and blankets for the laundry. The assistant manageress had wanted to draw his attention to another pile of linen. She had called: ‘Laundryman!’ He said he turned round and called back: ‘Yes chambermaid?’ But did he? Or was this what the French call l’esprit d’escalier, the spirited response that, alas, one thinks of too late, only while going down the stairs? His self-esteem was certainly battered. Another day he produced an elegant cigarette lighter from his pocket. He had found it in a garment sent for cleaning. ‘You don’t know whose it is?’ ‘Oh, I know the jacket it came from.’ ‘So? You can return it.’ ‘No. I can do with a lighter like that.’ I looked at him in amazement. After a moment he looked away. I never saw the lighter again. He must have thought better of it and returned it to the owner. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ On our way up from Durban we had stopped over in Johannesburg and had spent a week with my uncle and aunt. They had introduced my mother to the manager of a Johannesburg department store and she had negotiated a contract to supply felt flowers, to be pinned to ladies’ dresses. A few weeks after our arrival at Lusaka our cases arrived from the port of Beira. The Refugee Assistance Committee had advanced us the freight charges. Tools and supplies of many-coloured felt were unpacked and my mother set to work. She even took on two helpers. In our second room, which doubled as my bedroom, they cut and sewed and manufactured felt flowers. One night, when a consign111

RHODESIA ment was due to be posted to Johannesburg, I was put to bed in my parents’ room, which doubled as a dry cleaning room, while my mother and her helpers worked late. After a few weeks the supplies of German felt were exhausted and my mother calculated that if she had to import felt from South Africa her profit would be minimal. By then she had received several orders to make dresses, so no more felt flowers bloomed. Instead, I often went to sleep to the sound of her sewing machine. Rush jobs were not infrequent – a mourning dress for a funeral, or an evening dress for a Government House reception would keep her working until the small hours. But work was irregular, so when Mrs Mendelsohn, who ran the best dress shop in town, offered her a regular eight to four job as an alteration hand, she accepted. She soon spoke English with ease – even if incorrectly – and was promoted to sales lady. By and large, women appeared to cope better with emigration than men. They were usually younger and more adaptable. My mother was 16 years younger than my father. She had never had a job so she did not have to ‘change saddles’. She was soon earning more than my father and eventually, when she started her own dress shop, became a successful businesswoman. Curious! My parents had been so un-Jewish and yet they were now conforming to a classic eastern-Jewish pattern: The man, impractical, remote from the world, a bit of a dreamer, spends his life studying the Talmud. The wife struggles and makes the living. Of course they did not conform precisely: my father worked hard as a dry cleaner and it was only in his spare time that he studied – not the Talmud but the English language. When he was not swotting vocabulary he listened to overseas radio stations. But it was my mother who went out into the world, acquired a large circle of friends and for many years made the larger contribution to the family income. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I was sent to Lusaka Boys’ School, an all-white school, of course, but – despite the name – not confined to boys. About a third of the pupils were girls. There was a fee of ten shillings a term for tuition, textbooks and notebooks. There was, however, a provision that the fee could be waived if a JP certified that the family was in need. My mother went to talk to Mr Teagle, the JP. He said there was no point in making such an application. He would be pleased to pay my quarterly fees. ‘But do not tell anyone. Send your son at the start of each term and I’ll slip 112

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER him the money.’ I went and politely reported on my progress at school, but I found this very embarrassing and hated doing it. Worse was to come: After two or three terms the government abolished the fee. Mr Teagle, however, insisted on continuing his assistance. I handed his ten-shilling note – 40 times my weekly pocket money – over to my parents. I wish now I knew more about our benefactor. Years later I discovered that he had been one of ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’. Lord Milner, the first governor of the Transvaal and Orange Free State after the Boer War, recruited a cadre of bright young men from Oxford as future administrators. Many went on to brilliant careers as colonial governors or captains of industry in the ‘Empire on which the Sun never sets’. What fate had brought Mr Teagle to be an accountant in one of the dusty side streets of Lusaka? Lusaka Boys’ School was tough, very tough. I was the first of the new immigrant children to be sent there. Mr Jones, the headmaster was a sensible man. He realized that someone who spoke English badly and wore alien garments (such as very short continental shorts) would be bullied. He called Eric, the son of an English businessman, and entrusted him with my protection. Eric was tall, broad shouldered, and a nice fellow. We became friends. Unfortunately the following year he was sent to boarding school in Southern Rhodesia and I had to learn to fend for myself. The school did not mirror the composition of the population of Lusaka – I speak of the white population, of course. English children were in a minority. Civil servants did not normally send their offspring there. They could, I believe, obtain subsidies to send their children to boarding schools in England. We did have some native English speakers in my class – the children of businessmen, farmers and builders – but the number of Afrikaners was greater. There was also a sprinkling of Greeks and of Jews. My classmates crowded around me on the first day. ‘You German?’ they asked. ‘No,’ I explained, ‘I am a Jew, a Jew from Germany.’ I no longer regarded myself as German and, moreover, I knew that war between Britain and Germany was likely to break out soon so it seemed sensible to make it clear that I did not wish to be identified with the enemy. It took me some time to realize that the names of my classmates – van Niekerk, van der Merwe, Steenkamp and de Wet – were not English names. Most of them hated the British, the enemies who had defeated them in the Boer War. They hoped for a new war in which the British would be humiliated. What little they knew about Nazi race theories, especially about the inferiority of blacks and Jews, 113

RHODESIA fitted excellently well with their own prejudices. In their minds a Jew was an itinerant pedlar who tried to cheat a poor but honest farmer. ‘Joed?’ they said when I had explained my antecedents. ‘Not another bleddy Yid!’ Our teachers were not impressive. I had been used to more stimulating ones in Breslau. The best, by far, was a Mr Taljaard – an Afrikaner. English was his second language and he understood the difficulties that we, the five or six German speakers in his class, were experiencing. He was generous with his time and often gave up his ‘big breaks’ to correct our grammatical mistakes. He also stayed on after one o’clock – school closing time – to elucidate the red marks he had put on our essays. But his racism was typical of most Afrikaners. Once he told us about his recent vacation in Cape Town: ‘You know, down there you now see Coloureds driving motorcars!’ It was obvious he was not referring to the chauffeurs of Europeanowned vehicles. He shook his head. ‘Next there’ll be blacks, too. God alone knows what the world is coming to! It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ He gritted his teeth and clenched his fist. Unknowingly he once saved me from a thrashing. During ‘big break’ I had made eye contact with an extraordinarily muscular sixfooter, an Afrikaner boy named Davel. He had slicked-down dark hair, sharp, thin lips and angry pale blue eyes. He stared at me challengingly: ‘You’re getting funny with me, Joed?’ he barked. I protested that I had not meant to do anything to annoy him. ‘You’re lying too, bleddy Joed.’ An ominous pause: ‘I’ll see you at one o’clock!’ This was equivalent to a challenge to a duel. Davel was well known for ‘seeing’ classmates outside the school gates and beating them up. That day Mr Taljaard must have been surprised to find that I required help with so many problems of English. Davel waited for a long time but gave up eventually because his brother and sister demanded to be taken home. There were, however, other days when I did not escape his fist. Strange to relate: until I came to Lusaka I had no experience of school bullying. In neither my Catholic nor my Jewish school in Breslau had I experienced it. It seems not to have been part of school life. The Hitler youths who lurked outside were different: they were not schoolmates and, moreover, they had been indoctrinated. The three Davels came to school in a donkey cart. The donkeys were tied to a tree near the school gates. Their braying disturbed classes from time to time; but what caused far greater disruption were the enormous erections that the male beast occasionally achieved. The 114

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER Afrikaner boys shouted bawdy encouragements to the donkey. The girls – most of them Afrikaans-speaking but far, far more genteel – blushed and fled. Davel, however, followed them and boasted that he could do even better than the donkey. Some ten years later I heard that this same Davel had been sent to gaol for murder. He had fired his rifle and killed a ‘kaffir’ who had crossed the family farm. The African had used a footpath that his people had probably trod for centuries before these lands were ‘alienated’ for the benefit of white farmers, but the Davels regarded them as trespassers. Davel was not the only one among the 12 or 15 boys in our class to serve a prison sentence. Couvaras, the Greek, left school at the age of 15 to take over his family’s rural shop. It must have been a dull existence, but he was a keen hunter and the area was rich in game. One day he asked his servant to wake him before dawn. There was a buck he was hoping to bag when it came to the waterhole. The servant overslept and brought the early-morning coffee too late. Couvaras seized a kettle from the stove and forced boiling water down the man’s throat. He was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. It was, as I said, a tough school. The third of our class gaolbirds was different: Richard Jamieson – not his real name. I was fond of him. He was a tall and handsome lad with fine features. The girls loved him. I suspect he even succeeded in sleeping with the beautiful dark-haired Franscina, which I, alas, only dreamt about. Richard taught me how to climb into the Lusaka water tower for a swim. There was, at that time, no swimming pool in town. ‘We’ll go and piss into the governor’s teapot!’ was his way of advertising this exploit. He also taught me how to repair a cycle puncture. I met him again 15 years later. He was then the supervisor of a quarry high up in the mountains of Nyasaland. We were, both of us, under 30. I thought he looked far, far older. He had lost most of his front teeth and his eyes had sunk into his skull. He had become a drunkard, he explained without embarrassment. Whenever he got tanked up he got into fistfights. He had married a widow with several children. His wife was a good woman. She was always trying to stop him going to the pub. Of course, she was right, but he could not help himself. After one of his brawls the barman had called the police. He had had to spend a week or so cooling his heels in prison. This had happened several times since then. I felt sorry for Richard. He felt very sorry for himself too. His father had been the Lusaka town gaoler. His African nickname 115

RHODESIA Sjambokaela means the man with the whip. He had a reputation for brutality to black prisoners. Before becoming a gaoler he had been a professional boxer. Whenever a prisoner whom he regarded as a ‘cheeky kaffir’ was brought in, Jamieson would invite him to a boxing contest. The nervous prisoner, after having unfamiliar boxing gloves strapped on, would barely dare tap his gaoler’s chin. Then Jamieson would knock him cold with one well-aimed blow. He regarded the prisoners’ maize meal rations, as decreed by government, as ridiculously generous. ‘They never get so much grub outside. They commit crimes just to be sent here!’ He added vast quantities of cattle salt to the maize porridge to make it unpalatable. It was my friend Watson, the ‘petrol-boy’, who told me about Sjambokaela. Initially I refused to believe him. This can’t happen in a British colony! But I had every detail confirmed later by the local organizer of Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Welshman named Phillips. He preached conscientious objection during the war and suffered spells of imprisonment as a result. Of course, as a white man, he had not been subjected to Jamieson Snr’s brutality, but he had witnessed it. He had filed several written complaints. All had been ignored. He told another horror story. While waiting for his trial Phillips had overheard two white policemen in discussion. Their African subordinates – stupid bastards! – had maltreated an accused during interrogation. They had beaten him so severely that he had collapsed and died. Their superior officers were debating how best to cover up this embarrassing little business. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Among my classmates, one who did not serve a gaol sentence was Patrick Doyle. English was his mother tongue so I took him to be English. We got together from time to time to swap stamps. One day, at his house, he asked me whether I wanted to see ‘some pictures’. There was something in his voice that made it obvious that these were not going to be pictures of his aunt Jemimah – naked women perhaps? I agreed readily. But they were not what I had anticipated. He opened an old album and pointed to several sepia photographs of gallows. Five or six African corpses were dangling from them. ‘My uncle took these pictures.’ ‘Where?’ ‘In Nyasaland. They hanged a lot of ‘munts’ there. He helped them. Long ago.’ ‘Why?’ 116

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER ‘Don’t know. I think they were getting too cheeky.’ I was puzzled. Nothing in my history lessons had prepared me for this. We had heard a lot, during those war years, about German atrocities in their colonies before 1918 – especially about the suppression of the Herero rising in German South-West Africa. British colonialism, by contrast, had always been presented to us as spreading peace and civilization by peaceful means. Hadn’t the whole vast territory of Northern Rhodesia been annexed without bloodshed – or virtually so? Many years later I learnt what Doyle’s gruesome photographs had depicted. In 1964, at very short notice, the BBC seconded me to Malawi radio at the time of independence. My wife, who followed me out, brought along some of the few books she had been able to find about that country. Among them was Independent African by Shepperson and Price, a book about the 1915 rising led by John Chilembwe, a millenarian preacher, in the Chiradzulu district of Nyasaland. Chiradzulu was, and remains, an area of severe overpopulation and the rising was, in part, against the ‘alienation’ (meaning theft) of African lands for European settlement. The rising lasted a mere 11 days. Three Europeans were killed and two were wounded, but ‘considerable numbers’ of hangings of Africans followed. The executioner was a former regular soldier by the name of John Archer. He was paid a fee of £3 per execution and it was averred that he had expressed his willingness to hang the whole population of Nyasaland at this rate of remuneration.* I went to see Aleke Banda, Radio Malawi’s director-general and proposed a series of historical programmes for the following year – the fiftieth anniversary of the rising. His mouth dropped open: ‘Good God, and none of us has remembered! Of course – 1915. I must go and see the prime minister at once.’ Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda (no relative of Aleke’s) had not remembered either. That very day he ordered preparations for nationwide celebrations to honour this forerunner of the independence movement. He also commissioned an issue of commemorative stamps with a portrait of John Chilembwe. This was my one creative contribution to philately. But perhaps the credit should go to Patrick Doyle. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ * Nyasaland Times, 27 September 1917, as quoted in George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Independent African, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1958.

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RHODESIA There were, in the 1940s, no full secondary schools for whites in Northern Rhodesia. The director of medical services had decreed that the subtropical climate of the territory was harmful to the physical and mental development of European children. As a result no schools beyond Standard 7 (Form II) were provided. Instead, the government offered a subvention to parents who wished to send their children to schools in the more temperate climates of Southern Rhodesia or South Africa. I was sent to Southern Rhodesia. Not all took advantage of this: many saw no need to educate their children beyond the compulsory age. Some years later these climatic theories were abandoned and, so far as I know, no harm came to the grey matter of young whites. Hitler was not alone in having unsound theories about the effects of climate on personality. In my class at Lusaka there were two boys who performed consistently better than I. One was the son of an English railway clerk, the other the son of a German–Jewish butcher. Neither was sent south for further education. The first became a railway clerk, the second a butcher. I have always felt uncomfortable about this. What right did I have to privileged treatment? In my case it was simply taken for granted – by my parents, by my teachers and by myself – that I would eventually go to university. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ One of my father’s customers was a chicken farmer named Armitage. Once war had broken out he would often come and discuss the progress with my father. ‘So the Jerries have invaded Norway, have they? What are your Fritzes going to eat? They’ll be cut off from supplies, won’t they? The Royal Navy will see to that. Ice cream!’ He chuckled. ‘That’s what they’ll be eating – ice cream! ‘ ‘That depends on the Swedes,’ my father replied. ‘Will they have the courage to stop German transports crossing their country?’ Throughout the war my father spent his spare time listening obsessively to the radio. We had brought an excellent short-wave set from Germany. I had climbed up our jacaranda tree to fix an aerial suspended between two porcelain insulators. We had buried a pipe soldered to an earth wire outside our window. In the dry season I was sent out every evening to water the ground to ensure earth contact. Occasionally I pissed on it. Thus my father listened to the BBC’s German Service, to the Nazi’s Deutschlandfunk, to Free French Radio 118

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER from Brazzaville and occasionally to Beromünster in Switzerland. It was as if his life depended on the progress of the war, which – I suppose – it did. As a result, my father was well informed and although he held forth in slow, carefully formulated English Mr Armitage appeared to respect his judgement. He would drop in for chats even when he brought no clothes for cleaning. Shortly after the outbreak of war my father volunteered for the army. In his application he stated that he had served as an artillery sergeant in the First World War, then as a gunnery instructor and had even been trained on captured British cannons. My mother persuaded him to leave out the last as being, perhaps, ‘a bit tactless’. Anyway, he was turned down on grounds of age and nationality. He was 51. Armitage, the chicken farmer, invited me to his farm when his son came back from boarding school. The son was three or four years older than I. The Armitage farm was my first experience of the real African bush. Young Armitage taught me how to roast maize cobs over a wood fire. He showed me the ruins of ancient African smelting ovens and traces of early mining. He made me a present of a spear, which one of their farm workers had fashioned. The two of us, bearing spears ‘in case we meet a lion’, went on long walks along footpaths, no wider than a man, through tall grass. In central Africa grass grows to heights unknown in Europe – a foot or two higher than a tall man. One day we were walking on one of those narrow footpaths that generations of Africans have trod through the bush. We came face to face with an African family. The man walked ahead carrying a knobkerrie. His wife, balancing bundles of household goods on her head, followed. A baby was tied to her back. I stepped out of their way into the tall grass. Young Armitage, however, stood his ground. They passed him on the far side. As soon as they had gone he rounded on me angrily: ‘Never do that again.’ ‘Do what?’ ‘When you meet munts, you walk straight on. They must get out of the way. They must know who is master in the land.’ I kept quiet but a little while later, as we walked on, he asked: ‘What’s that tune you are whistling?’ I must have blushed furiously. I was whistling the Nazi’s national anthem, Die Strassen frei den braunen Bataillonen. ‘Clear the streets for the brown battalions! The storm troopers are marching.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ 119

RHODESIA I would like to be able to say that I was consistently alienated from the racist society of the Rhodesias and that I always stood up for the rights of blacks. I ought to have, given my background. But, alas, it is not so. I wanted to be one of the boys. Some of my white friends went out ‘kaffir hunting’, as they called it. I went along. On our bicycles we chased small black boys who were on foot. We did not hit them, but they were terrified of us and ran. This aroused the hunting instinct in us. We pursued, chasing them through the back lanes (namely the night soil removal lanes) of downtown Lusaka. There were four or five of us whites. Two would turn left, speeding along the main road and rejoin the back lane further up, blocking the path of the little black fugitives. We caught up with one of them. He had ceased running and was leaning against a wall, exhausted and coughing. He was coughing blood. This gave me nightmares for many days. I am still deeply ashamed of my part in this. I never again participated in such games and avoided the company of the ‘kaffir hunters’. There were three fine guava trees in our garden. Having no room of my own, I spent long hours sitting in these trees, munching the pink fruit and reading. I did some of my homework sitting in those trees. Little black boys would come past and I would pass down fruit to them – perhaps to expiate my sins. Soon after arriving at Lusaka I made friends with Watson. He was, in local parlance, a ‘petrol boy’, the pump attendant at a garage in Cairo Road, half a block from our house. He had had a few years of schooling – enough to keep a register of petrol dispensed and of cash taken. He also spoke some English. I would sit with him on a wooden box beside the petrol pumps and chat hour after hour. From him I learnt the names of the numerous African tribes – there were some 50 in a population of about two million. I learnt to recognize their tribal markings: the Angoni of the Eastern Province had largish holes in their earlobes. The Tonga of the Southern Province knocked out their two upper front teeth. At least they used to do so until the district commissioners banned it. No, Watson’s own facial scars were not tribal. These were cuts made to insert traditional medicines when he had been ill as a child. I asked Watson to teach me his language. He laughed. That would not do me much good, he explained. He belonged to a small tribe, the Kaonde, whose language was understood by few. What I ought to learn was Nyanja, the language of the Eastern Province and of Nyasaland. He himself spoke it and could teach me. In fact, like many Africans, he could communicate in four or five different languages. 120

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER Nyanja was the language of command of the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and the language that most civil servants tried to master. They got a salary increase if they could pass an examination in one of the major languages of the territory. But I knew that Nyanja was not the language that my classmates used in speaking to Africans. I wanted to learn what they all spoke. Fanagalo? Watson dismissed this with a gesture of contempt. He tried to dissuade me: this ‘Kitchenkaffir’ wasn’t a language at all. But I insisted. Reluctantly he taught me. Watson was, of course, right and I was making a serious mistake. Fanagalo is a primitive pidgin, virtually without grammar, using a vocabulary based on Zulu but without any of the sophistication of the Zulu language. White foremen in the gold mines of the Witwatersrand bawled at their gangs of black miners in this pidgin. South African whites carried it north to the Northern Rhodesian Copper Belt. Afrikaner farmers used it to give orders to their labourers. Petty traders – Indians, Greeks and Jews – haggled in this Fanagalo with their customers. But as a language it had no status. No district commissioner would have conveyed the King-Emperor’s orders in such a primitive pidgin. Had I but listened to Watson’s advice I could have saved myself many months of hard grind in later years, trying to learn first Nyanja and then Bemba. I never mastered either language well. Had I picked up Nyanja at the age of 12 I would have become fluent. But being fluent in Kitchenkaffir did me no good at all: when I became a civil servant I never even dared admit that I spoke it. I would have sunk in every black man’s estimation – classed with haggling shopkeepers or with poor-white Afrikaner farmers. Watson was as full of prejudices as any white: boys of the Ila tribe, he insisted, always got their first sexual experience with their own mothers. ‘Motherfuckers!’ he spat out in contempt. The Lovale were filthy people; that is why they worked as night-soil carriers. There was a hierarchy of tribes. The warriors – the Angoni and Lozi – ranked high in his estimation. Tribes they had subjugated in past centuries were dismissed as ‘women’. I spent many leisure hours listening to him. I was still sufficiently young not to attract white disapproval. In later years Europeans approached my parents and told them that a white child should not sit on a box in Cairo Road with a black man. But in those first two years this was tolerated and I learnt much about local customs, attitudes and prejudices from Watson. Like most Africans I met as a child, Watson was devoid of prudery. He spoke, humorously and without any trace of embarrassment, about 121

RHODESIA local sexual practices. Any desirable woman was expected to ‘dance’ – to perform a variety of pelvic gymnastics during intercourse – movements with names like ‘bicycle’ (a gyration); ‘steam-engine’ (an up-and-down pounding) and ‘double clutch’, the exact nature of which I do not remember, though I can guess. He explained to me that to excite a woman one had to stroke her buttocks but certainly not her breasts! Breasts were for babies, not for lovers. Watson told me that the Haya women from Tanganyika were the most skilled in sexual gymnastics, which is why they were so popular as prostitutes on the Copper Belt. Adultery, he explained to me, was a dangerous pastime. Any married woman who took a lover put her husband’s life at risk. If he were a miner, he would probably die in an underground accident. A soldier would stop a bullet. His wife’s infidelity would be to blame. Of course, a wise husband took precautions. A ‘witch doctor’ – so Watson called them – could give him medicine to insert into the wife’s genitalia. Her vagina would contract during illicit intercourse and her lover would be unable to withdraw. Many couples had been taken to hospitals on the back of lorries locked in such embraces. Even European doctors who were sceptical about witchcraft had never found a way of separating such a couple – except by amputating the man’s penis. Served him right! When I refused to believe this, Watson stopped the first acquaintance passing down Cairo Road who immediately confirmed it. ‘But of course! Didn’t you know?’ Amazing, how ignorant these whites were! Half a century later, after a lifetime in Europe, I returned to Africa to work on AIDS prevention campaigns. Surprisingly, Watson’s tuition proved of some use. In Tanzania a leading medical man mentioned, in passing, that he was of Haya origin. ‘Is that why you became a VD specialist, doctor?’ I asked. He looked up, astonished. ‘Precisely. But how do you know?’ I explained I had been brought up in what is now Zambia. ‘Ah,’ he nodded, ‘then you might know. Sexually transmitted diseases are a fearful problem among my people. Our birth rate is low. Our numbers are declining. And now, with AIDS!’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Sexual relations between whites and blacks were strictly taboo in 1939 and virtually unknown. Earlier, at the turn of the century, this had not been so. Two or three decades later it was to change again. In the beginning there were men like the famous Chirupula 122

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER Stephenson. He had been one of the early administrators of the British South Africa Company – Cecil Rhodes’s company. Later he wrote a book, Chirupula’s Tale, in which he told how he came to annex a large chunk of Africa – a task he accomplished with the help of one other Englishman and a baboon. He married an African wife under tribal law, had a great many children and made no secret of this at a time when the taboo was at its strongest. I quote: In those parts and in those days there were no European women. … But there were lots of women – ladies, too, if you like – of a different complexion. … And all went perfectly well till the ubiquitous Nosey Parkers declared that men who lived naturally – legally, moreover, according to the ways of the country and the period – were ‘living in sin’. … But if as a young man, fit and strong and light-hearted, it so happens that you live a thousand miles from white female society: if you see, day in, day out, black skins – so that black becomes the normal, the expected, the ordinary; and the black skin covers, often as not, happy cheerful hearts, exquisite bodies, smiling young faces – soit, as our Belgian neighbours say. My African wife’s name was Chisimongana.* Chirupula had a special status. The conventions of the time did not apply to him. But other pioneer settlers were more secretive about early sexual liaisons. There was ‘Mopani’ Clarke, for example. He had arrived at the beginning of the century and had acquired a large estate. At that time large tracts of the Northern Rhodesian highlands were ‘alienated’ to encourage white settlement. There were not many whites around to take advantage of this bonanza. Of these few even fewer proved able to hold onto their land. Some gambled their estates away. Others drank them away. Many simply abandoned them during the great depression. Mopani, however, was shrewd and capable. He made a fortune. In the early years he had a harem of black women. By the 1920s he sent them packing, went ‘respectable’ and married a white woman. I never knew him. He died not long after we arrived in Africa, but I did know the white daughter he acknowledged – the beautiful Erica Fitzgerald. My mother made dresses for her and once or twice I delivered these to her townhouse on my bicycle. She was vivacious, flirtatious, amusing and extremely attractive. She was heiress to her father’s estate and owned racehorses. Around her was a circle of * Geoffrey Bles, Chirupula’s Tale, London, 1937.

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RHODESIA ‘beautiful people’ who, I guess, tried to imitate the jet set of the Kenya Highlands. But it was not a large group. Most settlers in Northern Rhodesia were of middle or lower middle class origin and did not aspire to this lifestyle. Mopani’s daughter, however, carried it off with panache. She even acquired a title. She had married a senior colonial official who was widely regarded as a high-flier. She soon got bored with him and her affairs became a favourite subject of Lusaka gossip. Her husband was a Catholic and refused her a divorce. He did, however, ask for a transfer to another colony and left her behind. As predicted, he had a brilliant career and some years later he was knighted. Erica redesignated herself The Lady Fitzgerald! She gave extravagant parties and had more lovers. Unlike her father’s they were, of course, all white. Watson had told me all about Mopani. Most blacks knew; so did many whites. But it was not the done thing to talk about such matters. But did I know HC? asked Watson. No, HC did not sleep with black women. Not he. He only displayed his penis to them. He paid them a shilling or two to keep quiet, but of course they never did! In the period I describe the social pressures against interracial sex were fierce. Transgressions were immediately known throughout the black community and not long after percolated through to the whites. That is why I feel confident in saying that in the 1940s and 1950s such liaisons were extremely rare, at least in towns. Lone district officers in remote bush stations may, of course, have behaved differently. In the 1970s and 1980s sexual mores changed once again. Black men who had studied overseas brought back white wives. Sophisticated black women came back with degrees from overseas universities. Some entered into relations with white men – but as equals. It made for a more relaxed, less neurotic society. But this was in the remote future when I was a schoolboy. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I cycled around Lusaka and the surrounding villages day after day. There was not much else to do. Besides, I imagined myself an explorer. In 1939 there was only one tarred road in the commercial area. The street resembled one of those Wild West townships of American cowboy films. Cairo Road! The name recalled Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a British Empire ‘all red’ from Cape to Cairo. Only the west side of the road was built up when we arrived. There were two- or three-dozen shops, each fronted by a stretch of its own 124

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER pavement, shaded by a corrugated iron roof supported on pillars. The early structures had wooden pillars, but as the voracious appetites of the local termites became better known, brick pillars became more usual. But not every plot had been taken up, so one walked along a few yards of pavement, then stepped down a foot or so to baked earth and the glare of the African sun, walked for a few more yards and then stepped up again to another few yards of pavement and a welcome patch of shade. At the side of the shops, in the broiling sun, one often saw queues of Africans being served through small side hatches. On the opposite side of Cairo Road there was the railway track but no buildings apart from the station. There was, however, a deep, open storm-water ditch, shaded by jacaranda and flamboyant trees. Cars were parked there. Occasionally a car rolled in. This happened most frequently opposite the Corner Bar. One heavy drinker, the town undertaker Bowmaker, fell into the ditch from time to time, much to the amusement of African onlookers. After one such incident the district commissioner put Bowmaker on the ‘black list’ (whites only). No bar or bottle store was allowed to sell him any liquor. Was it done for the sake of Mr Bowmaker’s health or to uphold the dignity of the master race? Apart from Cairo Road there were several side roads – untarred and unpaved – named after empire-builders. Most of the Jews lived in houses on these dusty back streets. So did a few English businessmen and railwaymen, a Greek Cypriot builder and one or two of the wealthier Indian traders. That was ‘downtown’ Lusaka. This American term was not used in ‘NR’, but it describes well the relationship between the commercial area and ‘The Hill’, better known as ‘Nobs’ Hill’. An aerial photograph of Lusaka in 1939 would have given a clear picture of British colonial society: civil servants on the high ground, blacks tucked away, out of sight, on low ground; Indians by the edge of the African areas; white railwaymen and traders in and around downtown Lusaka. King George’s Avenue, commonly known simply as the tarmac, led to the hill – to Government House, the Secretariat and a civil servants’ suburb. My father and I usually took our evening constitutional walks along this unlit tarmac. My father gazed at the sky and pointed out the various constellations, just as he had done in Breslau. Each night he marvelled anew that they appeared upside down in the southern hemisphere. We walked as far as the second-class trading area, the Indian quarter. Most of my acquaintance with the Weimar Republic 125

RHODESIA theatre scene and with the literature of the period had its beginnings in these evening walks. My father talked. I pointed that torch he had acquired in Berlin at the tarmac – in case of snakes. In daylight too I often cycled out to the ‘the Indians’. Their shops had no side hatches for blacks. The shaded verandas did not serve as pavements but were occupied by African tailors with hand-operated sewing machines who turned khaki cloth into shorts or bush shirts and length of indigo into blouses. Behind each shop were one or two rooms where the proprietor lived with his wife and children. His nephew cum apprentice, more recently arrived from Gujarat, slept on the shop counter. The shopkeepers were friendly and several saved Indian stamps for me. Most spoke English badly but there was one who spoke it quite well. Once I asked him why every Indian trader sold exactly the same goods as every other: khaki and indigo cloth, blankets, candles, paraffin, sugar, condensed milk, maize meal, bicycles and bicycle spare parts. His explanation was that when an African gets his monthly salary it burns in his pocket. He wants to spend it all at once, so a good salesman tries not to let his customer leave until he has spent the lot. If he looks like leaving to look for a better bargain, the shopkeeper lowers his price or offers a pasella – a gift of a Japanese torch or a packet of sugar. But to retain the customer in his shop the trader has to stock everything his buyer could possibly desire. Of course, they were wrong. A later generation of traders went in for greater specialization – and became far wealthier. Nobs’ Hill, further up the tarmac, was a different world: wide treelined thoroughfares, generously planned traffic roundabouts, parade grounds and ceremonial avenues. But even at this altitude everything was planned hierarchically: blocks of modest two-room flats for female secretaries, three-bedroom suburban bungalows for junior civil servants, widely spaced double-storey residences shaded by fine trees for heads of departments. Where, I wondered cycling around this town, did the great black majority live? This was not immediately obvious. African ‘compounds’ were tucked away out of sight. Residential segregation in Northern Rhodesia was far more rigid than it was in South Africa at that time. A few domestic servants were housed in small houses at the back of their employers’ gardens, but the majority, whether domestic workers or civil servants, lived in long rows of identical two-room breezeblock houses hidden around the base of Nobs’ Hill. In African housing, too, there was an altitudinal hierarchy: at the very bottom, west of the abattoirs, on the ground that often flooded 126

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER during the rains, was the compound for municipal night-soil workers. Downtown Lusaka at that time had no waterborne sewerage. Behind each house, backing onto a narrow lane, was a small structure sheltering a wooden seat with a circular hole. A tin bucket stood below. Behind the bucket was a rear flap. After dark, the night-soil men trudged along the back lanes and emptied the contents of our buckets into barrels in an ox-cart. They then swilled out the buckets with an evil-smelling antiseptic and replaced them. We had to time our toilet visits carefully to avoid having the bucket pulled from under us! There were no laws to enforce Lusaka’s residential apartheid. It was simply accepted that this was the natural order of things. Or so it seemed in the 1940s. A mere 25 years later one Kenneth Kaunda, who came from one of those dreary two-room breezeblock and corrugatediron houses, took up residence at Government House as the first president of independent Zambia. I, who even as a schoolboy detested the system, never believed that this would happen in my lifetime. Nor did Kenneth Kaunda. He told me so. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The year I graduated one of my mother’s customers, a Mrs Lightfoot, wife of the chief establishment officer, expressed a polite interest in my future. She had read about me in the Bulawayo Chronicle: ‘Rhodesian boy wins South African debating contest.’ I was then touring British universities as the head of a South African debating team. My mother told Mrs L that I wanted to become a journalist but that she, herself, did not think I was being realistic. There was, after all, no press worthy of that name in Northern Rhodesia. But, she said, as I was passionately interested in ‘natives’ she thought I should try for the PA (provincial administration). Mrs L ventured a condescending smile: ‘that, you know, is one of those plum jobs; he would have to be public school – and Oxford.’ Mrs Lightfoot was already out of date: by the 1950s a new breed of young man – neither public school nor Oxford – was being recruited from England. But change had not gone so far that a settler’s son, and a Jew at that, would have been accepted into the PA. If, in the 1870s, my great-grandmother Fraenkel had consulted the Countess of Tost – in whose staff quarters she brought up her 12 children – about her son Arnold’s chances of becoming an officer in the Prussian army, the reply would not have been very different. But I 127

RHODESIA guess my great-grandmother would have understood the system and would not have bothered to ask. Northern Rhodesia’s elaborate status system was mirrored among domestic servants. The prestige of a ‘houseboy’ depended on that of his employer. The employees of European households looked down on those who worked for Indians. But even more lowly regarded were those who worked for a poor white Afrikaner – one so impoverished that he lived on a staple diet of maize porridge, just like his African labourers. When I eventually did find my first job in the civil service it was a lowly one: accounts clerk in the office of the registrar of cooperative societies. But Senti, our cook, was delighted. Now, he said, he was working for a real bwana. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My mother’s large circle of friends and acquaintances was almost entirely Jewish. This had been so neither in Cosel nor even in Breslau during the Nazi period. My father managed to preserve a certain distance from the community, hiding behind a screen of eccentricity. He was certainly odd. He had a nervous tic. His shoulders would frequently shoot up uncontrollably. There were periods when he sat staring in front of himself, in deep reverie, far away from whatever was going on around him. This behaviour worried me greatly. Would he end up talking to himself aloud, like his mother had done? He never did but there was enough about him to embarrass me. When we had guests whom he found boring he would unashamedly take up his book and immerse himself in reading in a corner of the room. When the guests were, in his view, staying too late he would tell a story – always the same story – about a host who covered his canary’s cage with a cloth and said: ‘Lucky bird! You can go to sleep. As for us – we have dear guests!’ But even for old Fraenkel it was not easy to withdraw from the life of the small community. Jewish services require a quorum of ten males over the age of confirmation – a minyan. If, during the day, a Jew dropped in to say that it was the anniversary of his father’s death and there would be a commemorative service that evening, my father felt obliged to go. He grumbled, but he went. However, the warm welcome that awaited him, especially if he turned up when nine men had been waiting impatiently to start their prayers, gave him some pleasure. He said he had attended more services in his first year at Lusaka than in the previous 50 in Germany. 128

WHERE YOU DIE OF HUNGER To me, such demands on my time were a great irritant. Lusaka life seemed, to me, doubly provincial. We lived in a small town ‘where the world was boarded up with planks’ and in an ethnic enclave within that town. I came to abhor the endless gossip. ‘So Finkelstein is having parquet in his new house? What? Even in the bedrooms? Is he is trying to out-do Rappaport? And corrugated iron isn’t good enough for his roof either? But I tell you this in strictest confidence; his business isn’t doing all that well. Wholesalers in Bulawayo are complaining. He owes them money.’ I became increasingly unhappy, embarrassed by my parents’ poverty and foreignness. I was invited to Eric’s house where his mother served us homemade ginger beer and muffins, but I could not invite him back because we had no room for entertaining. During business hours our living room served as the shop. Worse was the emotional intensity of our family life. My parents’ love was suffocating: If my teachers spoke well of me they were overcome with delight. It was as if their very survival depended on my ‘doing well’ because one day I would have to support them. It was a heavy burden for a teenager. If I got up to mischief, such as when I broke old Mrs Glasser’s window with my airgun, I was made to feel that I had destroyed – utterly and totally – all the great trust they had placed in me. I had been an obedient child. Perhaps the pressures of growing up in Nazi Germany had kept me close to them. I had suppressed rebellious thoughts. But now came adolescent revolt. It shocked them, my mother in particular. How could I possibly refuse to go to synagogue? And refuse to baby-sit for the rabbi? Or speak out aloud about the hypocrisy of a religious Jew who defrauded his African servants? How could I do such things – to her? I looked forward to boarding school. If the yarns I was reading about boarding-school life were true, there would be none of this emotional pressure at Milton Senior. And indeed, there was none.

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Chapter 6

Encountering Dimitrov and Macbeth ‘That man,’ grumbled my father, ‘plays Mozart as if he were fiddling at a Swiss village hop!’ The sessions of their string quartet became less frequent and eventually petered out. I do not know whether this was entirely Senn’s fault. My father was no Paganini either. Anyway, Senn did not bear umbrage. Whenever he came to town he would drop in at our house for a cup of tea. My father was often occupied, struggling to make a living, but I enjoyed chatting to him. Senn was Swiss and he did look like a peasant from one of the remoter Alpine valleys: stocky, square-headed and with short hair standing upright like a shoe brush. He wore spectacles with thick lenses and spoke in a slow, measured, very serious way. But, though ponderously, he spoke English, French, Italian, Russian and even Lithuanian, and of course German and Switzerdeutsch. We knew he had been the representative of the International Red Cross in central Africa, but he was not normally very communicative about himself. When I first met him he was managing a small farm on the outskirts of Lusaka. On one of his visits he brought some pipes he had just bought. He told us he was installing a system for pumping water up to his house on the hill. I joined in the conversation: surely he didn’t have electricity out there? No, he said, but he could pump water uphill without electricity. A windmill? No, he needed neither electricity nor wind power nor steam. With all the certitude of youth I told him this was impossible. He laughed. It was one of the few times I ever saw him laugh. He asked for paper and made a sketch. I remained unconvinced and bemused. He invited me to come and see for myself once he had finished the installation. A week or two later I cycled ten or more miles to his farm, and saw. There was certainly no electricity on his farm – paraffin lamps lit his little house at night – neither was there a windmill or steam engine, but there was a spring that fed a small pond in the valley and from there he was, indeed, pumping water up to a tank that supplied his house and would soon, he said, 130

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH irrigate his vegetable garden. He gave me the name of the system in Switzerdeutsch and then in Russian. Neither meant anything to me. Fifty years later I learnt that in English it is called a hydraulic ram. A volume of water is piped and made to flow downhill through valves. The momentum is used to push a fraction of that water uphill through a narrower pipe. The valves open and shut with a click, letting in new surges of water but stopping it from flowing back. Since no input of expensive power is required, the mechanism can be left chugging away day and night. In this way quite a large reservoir at a higher level can be kept filled. Having convinced me that the impossible was possible Senn invited me to share his austere bread and cheese lunch. He crossed himself. At the end of the meal he initiated me into drinking very hot tea poured on raspberry jam – Russian style, he said. After lunch, while we talked, he went back to wood carving: he was shaping chairs and stools in traditional Swiss peasant style. He seemed to like my curiosity. As I was about to leave he said in his slow considered way: ‘Peter, would you like to come and see me next Wednesday? Ten o’clock in the morning? Would that suit you? But you must be prepared to stay at least two hours, perhaps two and a half. We have been friends for some time and it is time I told you the story of my life.’ It took four hours, but I was riveted. His story lifted me out of the confines of that dull little African town ‘where the world was boarded up with planks’. He had been brought up in Odessa, son of a Swiss veterinary surgeon. He had gone to Russian schools but afterwards his parents had sent him back to Switzerland to study agronomy. In 1918 or 1919 he had made his way back to Russia to take up arms against the Bolsheviks, serving in a ‘White’ cavalry regiment under Admiral Kolchak. I knew he was a fervent Catholic – he walked into town most mornings to attend mass – so I did not have to ask about his motives for taking up arms against the godless. After the defeat of the White Russians he made his way back to Switzerland – he recounted hairraising adventures en route. Some time later the International Red Cross asked him to go back to Russia to help with relief during the first great famine. A Swiss who spoke fluent Russian would have been useful. His experiences in the famine years made him more tolerant towards communists. ‘There were some saintly characters among the commissars,’ he said, ‘especially among the Jews. They cared nothing for themselves, but sacrificed themselves for others. If they hadn’t been atheists and Jews I would have said they were good Christians.’ Eventually he returned to Switzerland but a little later he saw an 131

RHODESIA advert: the newly independent state of Lithuania required administrators from abroad. Swiss nationals were, apparently, desirable. I suppose they were unlikely to have territorial designs on the young state. He applied and was accepted. He told me: Lithuanian is the most difficult language I have had to learn. You know even the Jewish shopkeepers spoke to the peasants in German or Russian. Nobody ever bothered to learn Lithuanian. It has one of the most complicated grammars in the world. Still, when I was appointed personal assistant to the minister of the interior, I sat down and studied the language. But the minister always spoke to me in Russian. Senn decided to do something about conditions in Lithuanian prisons. He had toured penal establishments left over from Russian tsarist days and found them brutal and degrading. As a first step he wrote a report recommending reform in the treatment of juvenile offenders. They were to be separated from adult criminals and to be given technical training. Perhaps it was unfortunate that similar reforms were, at that very time, being introduced by the godless across the border in the Soviet Union. His minister rejected Senn’s report with a curt note: ‘I will provide money for knouts. Nothing more.’ Senn was outraged. He leaked the minister’s annotation and his own recommendations to the press. There were press demands for the minister’s resignation. But the minister struck back. He denounced Senn, that most fervent of Catholics, as a Bolshevik agent bent on introducing into Lithuania ‘red’ methods of re-educating orphans – Felix Dzherjinsky’s methods. Fortunately, Senn had friends among the Jesuits. They spirited him out of Lithuania at the dead of night and found him a job at a Catholic mission station a long way away – in Southern Rhodesia, of all places. On a subsequent visit of mine, Senn added a detail he had, apparently, not considered very important: I thought otherwise. Once, while he was still at peace with the minister of the interior, he had been ordered to proceed to the German border to escort a VIP to the Soviet border. The man turned out to be Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist who had been the main accused at the German Reichstag fire trial. It was Dimitrov who turned that trial around and accused the Nazis of setting fire to the parliament building. His leonine courage made headline news throughout the world. He was hailed as one of the great heroes of the communist movement. Eventually, he 132

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH became head of the Comintern and, after the war, prime minister of Bulgaria. Senn told me: Dimitrov appeared to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown. He wept all the way from the German frontier to the Soviet frontier. I had ordered a meal but he would not touch it. I spoke to him in German. I spoke to him in Russian. I got nothing but sobs. I was puzzled. I still am, after all these years. Half a lifetime after this conversation I found myself in Sofia. I stood before the embalmed corpse of this same Dimitrov in a building modelled on Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow – but smaller, as befitted a satellite state. Senn’s story came back to me. I went back to London to read, with close attention to detail, the story of the Reichstag trial and its aftermath. Many theories have been published about Dimitrov’s unexpected acquittal. Had the Nazis done a deal to free him in return for Germans held in the Soviet Union? Did he know this and was that why he could confront Goering with such defiant courage – and not be shot? Or did he collapse under Nazi torture and betray Comintern comrades to secure his own release? I persuaded a colleague, a Russian scholar, to search Pravda and Izvestia in the British Museum’s press archives. Yes, there was an interval of several weeks between Dimitrov’s expulsion from Germany and his welcome as a hero at a mass meeting in Moscow. The interval adds credence to Senn’s story of a nervous breakdown. But it does not explain the cause. A minor footnote to European history? No doubt.* But it is not what one would expect to come upon in a modest farmhouse in remotest Africa, sitting uncomfortably on a * Senn is referred to critically in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography The Long Road to Freedom. They met when Senn was the International Red Cross prison visitor to the high security prison on Robben Island. Mandela erroneously describes him as a Swede and accuses him of racism. I cannot guarantee that Senn’s attitudes remained totally unaffected by the racism of the white Rhodesians among whom he lived. However, I find Mandela’s evidence unconvincing. Senn apparently did not take up the prisoners’ complaints about their diet. They complained of a diet consisting largely of maize meal porridge (the traditional Southern African staple) and demanded bread. Senn, according to Mandela, argued that the maize meal was better for their teeth. Was this racism? Several nutritional studies published around that time attributed the sudden epidemic of tooth decay among Africans to a change to a European diet of white bread, jam and sugar. Senn must have been familiar with these studies.

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RHODESIA wooden stool, Swiss peasant style. On yet another visit I asked Senn had he never contemplated marriage? ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. He had been greatly in love with a young Russian woman, but in the chaos of the civil war he had lost her. He had never found her again. He had spent years trying to trace her. She had probably perished in one of those Ukrainian massacres. The pain was still with him. After that he had never again wanted to marry. In 1939 he had been quietly working as an agronomist on a Catholic mission station in Southern Rhodesia when the International Red Cross appointed him its central African representative. ‘And that’s why I dare not show my face up Nobs’ Hill.’ I knew what he meant. At Kafue, south of Lusaka, the Northern Rhodesian government had built a camp for Italian POWs captured in Ethiopia. The site was badly chosen: the area was malarial. Senn condemned the camp as unfit for human habitation. It cost the government many thousands to build a new camp on a healthier site. Not many years after our conversation the International Red Cross called him out of retirement once again. This was during a period of civil war in the former Belgian Congo. One heard rumours of Senn’s activities there. Some reports of his heroism even appeared in the newspapers but it was not until the Zaire troubles were long over and he visited us in London that I could persuade him to give me his own account. He had received reports that torture of political prisoners was going on at a certain prison. He had marched to the gate, pushed aside the guards and their guns and walked right into the chief warder’s office. He had demanded that the warder release – but immediately – certain political prisoners who were held there without charge. The chief warder meekly surrendered the prisoners to the representative of the International Red Cross. ‘How do you do it?’ I asked him. ‘It’s a great advantage to be old,’ he said. ‘Africans respect grey hair. And bullyboys are always taken aback if you don’t flinch when they poke their guns into your ribs. I don’t.’ ‘I’m sure they think you have occult powers,’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps I have! I do say to myself: what better way of losing one’s life than in doing one’s duty to God and man? I smile in a friendly way – I never respond to aggression with aggression – and push their gun barrels away. ‘My son,’ I say, ‘don’t do anything you would regret for the rest of your life.’ I’ve had to do it several times. No one has yet pulled the trigger!’ When he felt he was getting old Senn went back to Rusape, the 134

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH mission station in Southern Rhodesia to which he had gone when the Jesuits had first spirited him out of Lithuania. He did a deal with the missionaries. If they would look after him until he died and give him a decent burial, he, in return, would provide the equipment for a sawmill that would provide the mission with a steady income. He imported machinery from Switzerland, ran the sawmill for several years and trained local Africans in the use of the equipment. Despite his ponderous manner, he was astute and saw a possibility that no one else had seen. In much of central Africa termite-resistant hardwood trees flourish, but, for reasons I do not know, these trees do not grow tall and straight. They bend and twist so they cannot provide long runs of planks suitable for beams or for furniture. It is a pity, because the wood is hard and durable. What other use could be made of short pieces of termite-resistant hardwood? Senn decided on roofing shingles. He persuaded nearby African villagers to abandon their use of thatch, which has to be replaced every few years, and substitute wooden roof tiles. They were cheaper than imported corrugated iron sheets and certainly more attractive. He told me with a chuckle that a local Jewish shopkeeper had told him that the African villages around the mission station reminded him a little of the Baltic stetl where he had grown up. Senn had replied in his best Lithuanian: ‘And where do you think I learnt to make roofing shingles?’ The missionaries got another unexpected bonus from their deal with Senn. He grew grapes and made wine. ‘Is it any good?’ I asked. ‘I drink it,’ he said. ‘One or two of the fathers will join me in a glass. But I have to admit, they produce a better white on the Moselle.’ When he first told me he was going to retire to that mission station at Rusape I emboldened myself to ask: ‘Have you ever considered entering a monastic order?’ He thought for a while: ‘I could take the vow of poverty. No problem, I have always lived frugally. The vow of chastity? Again, no problem – certainly not at my age. But the vow of obedience? Never!’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Sam Wolpowitz spoke English badly and with a heavy Yiddish accent, but he had a passion for Shakespeare. I would visit him in his little two-room lean-to behind his half-built cinema. He hoped it would restore his fortunes but the building was making slow progress. He frequently ran out of money and building operations stopped. Then he trudged around the town trying to borrow money for the next stage. 135

RHODESIA Despite all this there was always a bottle of whisky on his table and a volume of Shakespeare on his lap. ‘Listen!’ he would say by way of greeting. ‘Sit, boy. Sit and listen: Tomoiroo and tomoiroo and tomoiroo kripps in its petty pais from deh to deh to de last sillabel off recorded time. ... Vonderful, in’t it? Out, out. …’ At other times he would recite passages from the King James Bible. He loved the Bible but he was, I think, the only Jew in Lusaka who never once entered the synagogue, largely because he detested the chairman of the congregation. I shall call him Rybakov. And yet, I know it sounds contradictory, Wolpowitz was barely literate. In my school holidays I often earned some money doing sign writing. When his new cinema was – after endless delays – nearing completion he asked me to paint bold red signs ‘ESCAPE DOOR. NOT LOCKED.’ There were two emergency doors near the cinema screen, one on each side. First, I did the sign on the right. The writing ran from the screen towards the projection box, namely from left to right. When I set up my ladder over the opposite door, Wolpowitz demurred. He said I should start on the screen side and work towards the projection box, as I had done on the opposite side. It took me a few moments to realize that he wanted me to write from right to left. I said English was always written from left to right. Wolpowitz insisted that I was mistaken. English could be written either way. I conceded that Hebrew was written from right to left, but English – never. He said he was certain that he had, on his shelves, books, good books printed in England, written both ways, one line from left to right, the next from right to left. For all I knew, I argued, this might be possible in Russian (he had had a few years of Russian schooling) but it was not possible in English. In the end he shrugged and gave way: ‘you go to school here; I suppose you ought to know, but I’ll go and look up my books.’ After I had finished my day’s task I went up to his rooms for a cup of tea. He was declaiming Shakespeare again but he never again mentioned the subject of writing from right to left. Wolpowitz had once been a wealthy man but the depression had hit Northern Rhodesia hard. The copper mines, the country’s one and only industry, had closed. In 1935 he was declared bankrupt. Perhaps he contributed to his ruin by the time he spent with Shakespeare and with whisky. The Carlton Hotel, which he had owned, and the attached cinema and bar, were put up for auction. His wife walked out on him. She was reported to have said she could not bear to live with a drunkard. She took their son, whom he adored, back to Leeds. At the public auction a Jewish merchant, Rybakov, acquired Sam’s property 136

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH for a song. He was not a man to waste time on literature or whisky, though he too had a weakness: women! For years after Wolpowitz alleged that Rybakov had bribed other interested parties to dissuade them from bidding. I was fond of old Sam but I never believed this. True, many people accused Rybakov of underhand deals, but in the midst of the great depression there would not have been many bidders for a half-derelict hotel and a fleapit of a cinema. A brief tangent: the cinema remained a fleapit for many years until Rybakov built a modern one by its side. The film would often break and there were unplanned intervals. Nevertheless, every Saturday night senior civil servants from Nobs’ Hill would come down for the show dressed in black tie and evening dress. If the governor himself were announced, God Save the King would be played as he entered. And, of course, at the end of each performance the national anthem would be played again and we would all stand to attention: end of tangent. Wolpowitz pursued Rybakov with obsessive hatred. Limping around Lusaka he told all who were willing to listen – and many who were not – about Rybakov’s scandalous sex life and his shady business dealings. He also spread scurrilous tales about other pillars of society and how they had first made their money: this one had dealt in illicit diamonds; the other had sold meat to the Belgian Congo forces – the same consignment several times over. Some of his tales sounded improbable to me until I met Johnston. Wolpowitz told me I bore a resemblance to his own son and he was always pleased to see me. I found him fascinating. You never knew whom you would meet in his company. One day I accompanied him on his slow progress down Cairo Road. He walked with a stick, suffering from gout or rheumatism. He also wore a wide-brimmed hat, a habit he had acquired in his youth when (unsuccessfully) he had tried his luck in the American Wild West. As we approached the Grand Hotel, which was anything but grand, he stopped abruptly and stared at an old man who was sitting on a bench outside the bar, smoking. After a moment’s hesitation he advanced and addressed the other. ‘Johnston? Is you?’ The other nodded. ‘So – vot say you? Shall ve let bygones be bygones?’ The other rose. ‘Let’s drink to that, Sam!’ The two old men went into the bar, leaving me outside. A few moments later Wolpowitz emerged carrying a bottle of lemonade for me. ‘Don’t run ’vay,’ he said. ‘Dere’s a story … vill interest you.’ 137

RHODESIA I waited an hour, then gave up and went home. It was not until several days later that I heard his story. Back in the 1920s he, Wolpowitz, had been a firewood contractor for the railways – over in the Belgian Congo. They ran locomotives on wood in those days. It was a good business. He brought an ox-wagon full of firewood to the railway encampment in Elizabethville and got the store man to sign a receipt. Then he took his load out by the back gate, drove around again to the front and got it receipted a second time, or even a third time. The storekeeper did well out of it, but he did even better. This man we had met – this Johnston – had been his foreman, in charge of the munts cutting trees. One day, as Sam came back from the bank with the month’s wages, Johnston had pulled out a revolver. ‘Hands up!’ he says. Vot I do? I put up hands. He makes a grab for de money. My munts see deir wages disappearing. They jump him from behind. Ve tie him up and chuck him on de back of an ox-cart – no cars in dose days – and took him to de police at Elizabethville. The officer in charge was a Fleming who spoke some English. He took Johnston’s revolver, opened it, then laughed: it wasn’t loaded! He laughed! ‘Wot, a hold-up isn’t a bloody hold-up?’ But he says ‘Sam, you don’t vant to bring a case against a vite man, do you? Would make a bad impression on de blacks.’ He ordered Johnston untied, kicked him up de arse and said: ‘Don’t let me see you in dis district again. Never. You hear me?’ And you know, I haf never seen Johnston again until ve met him last week. To me, these tales were as exciting as the Karl May or Zane Grey thrillers I was devouring. But I had journalistic ambitions and thought of offering a series of Old-timers’ Tales to a newspaper. I asked Wolpowitz whether he would let me write up this story – names changed, of course. He would not hear of it: ‘p’rhaps ven he’s snuffed it ... and ven I have, but not now. No.’ So here it is! Both have long snuffed it. A week or two later I went to see Sam Wolpowitz to say goodbye before going back to boarding school. He had a visitor, another elderly man. ‘Now dis a story you can write up,’ he said and introduced his visitor: ‘Commander Dudley, Royal Navy.’ I had heard of the commander’s exploits but had never met him. I 138

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH was surprised to see so weather-beaten a man. I asked permission to come and interview him. He agreed readily and we settled on the following morning since I was departing for boarding school the day after. The commander was working as a road foreman, rebuilding a bridge several miles outside Lusaka. The large tent near the bridge, he explained, was his. I cycled out next morning but he was not at home. His ‘houseboy’ brought me a cup of tea and offered various theories about what might have delayed the bwana in town. Later I heard him outside the tent, chatting to the capitao in Nyanja. I had, by then, picked up a certain amount of that language. If the bwana had gone to the Corner Bar, he said, he would probably not be brought back before midnight. I left without ever getting the commander’s story from his own mouth. This is what I heard from Wolpowitz. At the beginning of the First World War Tanganyika was a German colony. The Germans had two steamers on Lake Tanganyika, which, with some ingenuity, they converted into gunboats. They used them to shell settlements on the Northern Rhodesian and Belgian Congo shores of the lake. They sank several boats belonging to missions. They even mounted raids into British territory. After the sinking of the mission vessels the Germans had total command of the lake. The British decided to ship out a gunboat in pieces. Dudley, a naval engineer, was put in charge of the transport and the assembly of this vessel. Sections were shipped out from England and railed from Cape Town all the way to Kapiri Mposhi in Northern Rhodesia. From there, a regiment of porters, recruited by Dudley, carried head-loads overland through hundreds of miles of forest. They had to ford rivers and climb over hills. On Lake Tanganyika Dudley found a well-sheltered cove, constructed a simple shipyard, camouflaged it and began to assemble his vessel. Once a German gunboat steamed by quite close but without detecting them. Dudley launched his boat, got up steam and, skipping all tests and trials for fear of detection, made straight for the enemy base. He surprised two German boats at anchor and sank them before the Germans could even get up steam and return fire. He was highly decorated. This version of the story does not quite coincide with one I found recently in a history for African schools published in colonial days. According to this version the segments of the boat were unloaded somewhere in the Belgian Congo, put on wagons and pulled across hundreds of miles by traction engines. Dudley would have had to cut a path through heavy forest to move traction engines. The actual naval engagement, according to this version, was not under the command of 139

RHODESIA Dudley himself but of a Lieutenant-Commander Spicer-Simpson. Since the little book was written when many of the participants would have been alive, I assume it is more accurate than the version Wolpowitz provided. Dudley’s feat may have grown in the retelling. ‘But see,’ said Wolpowitz when I saw him some time later, ‘after all dis de rest of his life has been – vot’s de vord? – an anticlimate?’ Wolpowitz himself went down battling. His second cinema had been built with borrowed money. There were long delays as he trudged around trying to borrow more. Eventually he got it opened, but he got into arrears with the film distributors in South Africa. In the end they insisted that their films be sent to an intermediary, Shapiro. Wolpowitz had to pay Shapiro in advance to receive his reels. As a result, on some evenings, the audience arrived to be told there would be no show ‘because of a technical hitch!’ The truth was he had been unable to raise enough cash to get his film released. I saw several films puffed and out of breath after having carried Sam’s cash down to Shapiro and cycled up the hill with the cans of film – only just in time. In the end his creditors foreclosed and Wolpowitz was declared bankrupt for the second time. He was by then very ill with cancer. An old Jewish market gardener named Isaak took him in and nursed him in his last months. (I hope Isaak went to heaven!) The chief creditor – a Swiss named Schmidt – seized the cinema projectors and arranged to rail them to Johannesburg for sale. Some weeks later it was discovered that they had never arrived. They had last been seen in their crates, in the open, in the Rhodesia Railways goods yard. Of course, anyone with a white skin could have driven in and removed them without being challenged by the black watchmen. That is how things were in Northern Rhodesia in those days. Schmidt, however, made a shrewd guess and laid charges against Wolpowitz. Palmer, the magistrate, had known Wolpowitz for many years and liked the old rogue. I think they shared a detestation for Rybakov and a liking for whisky. The magistrate took a bottle out to Isaak’s farm and after a few glasses Sam and he came to an agreement: Wolpowitz told him where he had hidden the projectors and the magistrate said he would see to it that no charges were preferred. They sealed it with another glass … or perhaps two. Wolpowitz denounced Schmidt as a rogue and a thief – almost as villainous as Rybakov – and told a few more stories, probably exaggerated, about the latter’s lechery. Wolpowitz died a week or two later. His funeral was sparsely attended – only Palmer the magistrate came and Isaak the market gardener and two or three others. He had made more enemies than friends. 140

ENCOUNTERING DIMITROV AND MACBETH The cinema he built with long delays has long been levelled. Today, on the very site, stands the Anglican cathedral of the Holy Cross. What would old Sam have made of that? Great Caesar turned to clay, Might plug a hole To keep the wind at bay?

141

Chapter 7

Quit you like men The journey from Lusaka to Bulawayo took 36 hours by train. My father, seeing me off, joked that I would be thinking back upon home as upon Paradise Lost. Milton School was, however, not named after John Milton, the poet, but after a Sir William Milton, an early British South Africa Company administrator. About nostalgia for my parental home, Dad was equally in error. I took to boarding school: I now wore a blue blazer, standard-length grey shorts and a straw boater – the same as all the other boys. Milton modelled itself on a British public school. We had prefects, fags, a cadet corps, a scout troop and an ethos imported from England. This ethos may have been in decline ‘at home’, but in our remote corner of the empire it was still going strong. Milton was not a public school in the English sense, namely private and elite, but state-owned and open to all comers, provided they were white, of course. Normally, tuition and boarding fees were charged, but in the case of youngsters from north of the Zambezi (where the sun was thought to dry out our young brains) the Northern Rhodesian government paid the fees in full. It worried me later, knowing how African education was neglected! The boys at Pioneer House were a fairly uncouth lot but, so far as I know, there were no future murderers among us. The initiation ceremonies were a little rough. I was handed a greasy sausage and told to measure the circumference of the rugby field. I reported back: 2342 sausage lengths. I was told that my work was slipshod and ordered to try again. My second figure was accepted. Later a cardboard funnel was inserted between my belt and my belly. A ‘ticky’ – a Rhodesian thrupenny piece – was placed on my nose. I was told to prove the accuracy of my aim by projecting the coin into the funnel. In fact, as I stood balancing the coin precariously on my nose, a jug of water was poured into the funnel and down my trousers. ‘He’s pissed himself,’ they all shouted, ‘He’s pissed himself.’ I was astute enough to join in the laughter. Had I cried, I would have been subjected to weeks of ragging. A few minutes later a second initiate was conducted into the common room and I, too, joined in the general shout: ‘He’s pissed himself!’ 142

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN In the dining hall we sat at long refectory tables. Each morning one bowl of sugar was placed at the head of the table. This bowl did not circulate. The boy at the head of the table emptied the lot into a jar. That was going to be his week’s supply of sugar, spooned into his tea or spread on thinly buttered slices of bread when the jam ran out. Every boy had his own jar. The next day our table round shifted by one seat and a second boy got his chance to grab his week’s supply of sugar. I knew nothing about English table manners and felt ill at ease. I looked around. One boy was scratching his head with his fork. Another licked his finger, stuck it into his jar of sugar and sucked. This too did not seem like the behaviour of an English gentleman. At the far end of the table, however, I saw a boy who appeared ‘well bred’. He kept his hands on the table, just as I had been taught to do. He did not cut his potato with a knife but used his fork – just as I had been taught to do. ‘Easy’, I thought, ‘their table manners are just like ours.’ After the second or third meal I got talking to this paragon. Fred came from Koenigsberg! I had been warned that in an ‘English’ school great emphasis would be placed on sports. And so it was. The school’s heroes were the cricketers and rugby players in ‘the first’. A bookworm like me could earn no glory. But I learnt that there were ways of being accepted, more or less. I never made it beyond the rugby third – third equalled bottom – but I saw that it was advisable to play the game. It showed that you were a ‘good sport’, unlike some who found ways of opting out. Once and only once I even earned some glory: in a clumsy tackle I brought down an unpopular teacher. He was hurt as he hit the ground and had to limp off the field. My team-mates slapped me on the back. Word went around the school and that evening even shining heroes like Kevin Curran (an international cricketer in later years) congratulated me. The glory was short lived. I also discovered that it was politic to train for the mile. Running such a distance is not only a test of stamina but of ‘guts’. It required weeks of practice: forcing oneself on despite pain, despite breathlessness, despite a racing heart. My body and my common sense told me to stop and sit down by the side of the track with a good book. Milton conventions demanded otherwise. I ran the mile regularly at the annual school sports. I always came second last or third last in a field of 30 or 40. Great applause greeted us, the pathetic rearguard, when we reached the goal. The first time this happened I felt humiliated. I thought the applause was ironic. I was wrong. It was a genuine 143

RHODESIA tribute: we stragglers had not dropped out winded or complaining of a stitch when more talented sportsmen had. We had proved that we had ‘guts’. Doesn’t the One Great Scorer record ‘not that you won or lost, but how you played the game?’ The school’s motto was Ανδριζεσθε – ‘quit ye like men’. Perhaps ‘acquit yourselves’ would be a better translation. The only person I knew who could read the Greek writing on my blue blazer was my own father, though I guess young Babiolakis in Form II might have managed. Many years later I read about the genesis of this motto. It is a quote from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. When it was suggested to Milton’s first headmaster, one Colonel Brady, he approved, saying it could also be rendered freely as ‘play the game’. I wonder what St Paul would have made of that. ‘The game’ had a great significance in our world: it did not suggest ‘play it cool, treat life as a game.’ It certainly carried no hint of gaming or – perish the thought – of being ‘on the game’. What it did, however, recall was the Duke of Wellington’s aphorism about the battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton. Governing an empire required discipline, team spirit and rules, especially team spirit. Our Latin teacher, who also trained the rugby first, spent more time inculcating into us the ethos of the British Empire – so soon to be defunct – than teaching us the language of the long-defunct Roman one. Lest we forget! ‘Be like dynamite!’ he would say. ‘Face problems straight on: tackle difficulties, the toughest first. Dynamite always takes the line of most resistance.’ I cannot judge his command of Latin but I certainly hope it was better than his physics! Team spirit was deeply ingrained in our schoolboy mores. Say some heinous crime had been committed: a chemistry experiment had been ruined deliberately to avoid our having to write it up. Mr Roberts would demand sternly: ‘who has done this?’ No one sneaked on the culprit. When similar offences were committed in either of my two German schools – Catholic or Jewish – one or two pupils would have readily pointed out the offender. But at Milton a sneak would have had to suffer contempt, not only from his fellows but from the teachers as well. On the other hand, if it seemed likely that the wrong boy was about to be punished, the true offender was expected to stand up and own up: ‘Sir, I did it.’ If he failed to do so (and in my years at Milton this did happen once), the falsely accused ‘took the can’ – acquitting himself like a man! But that was not the end the matter: the schoolboy collective then sent the coward to ‘Coventry’. No one would talk to him for months. 144

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN One night a boy who thought he had been treated very unfairly went out and punctured the tyres of the offending master’s car. This was a crime so serious that it would certainly have resulted in his expulsion if he could have been identified. In this a case the boy did not own up, nor did we expect him to do so. Pioneer House accepted collective punishment. The entire hostel was gated for several weekends: no Sunday visits to friends of the family or girlfriends. The culprit was known to all of us, but no one sneaked. In fact, collective punishment bonded us: see what splendid fellows we are! The converse of the schoolboy ethos was, of course, that one did not accept credit for the deeds of others. When a rugby forward was congratulated for a spectacular try, he would murmur that it would never have been possible without Tim or Jock, in fact without the fine performance of the entire team. How much of this ethos survives in Britain today? Gating was a comparatively rare punishment. Caning was more common: ‘six of the best’ on the buttocks, administered either by a teacher or a prefect. A teacher only caned me once; I am not counting prefects. I had sought and obtained permission to attend a symphony concert but had sneaked off to the cinema. A Yank at Oxford was showing – a film not worth the caning. As the lights came on I saw one of our housemasters sitting in the row immediately behind. Next morning I was called into his study. ‘Well, you know what to expect, don’t you?’ I nodded and bent over. It is accepted opinion these days that such a humiliating beating should have had a traumatic effect on me. It did not. In fact, though painful, it came as something of a relief: the others had regarded me as a bit of a goody-goody, which was even worse than being a bookworm. Having taken a caning helped to make me ‘one of the boys’. Of course I knew that all eyes would be upon me when I returned from the master’s study. One had to grin and make light of the caning and, through clenched teeth, I did. The master himself, after administering the beating in a detached, mechanical way, said: ‘and in future remember the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be found out.’ Thereafter, he bore me no umbrage and I retained no resentment. In my parental house, where there were no beatings, the atmosphere would have been heavy with reproach for days following one of my rare peccadilloes. This emotional intensity in my family was probably the real reason why I did not look back upon home as upon Paradise Lost. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ 145

RHODESIA Our school cadet corps paraded with pre-1914 carbines. For target practice, however, more modern .22 rifles were issued to us. I graduated from square-bashing to the signal corps and eventually to the more glamorous air cadets. Southern Rhodesia was, during the war, an important training ground for the RAF. There were rings of airfields around Bulawayo, Gwelo and Salisbury. In our school dormitories we were roused from sleep at daybreak by low-flying Anson trainers. I was delighted to be accepted into the air cadets; it was much more fun than paradeground drill. We spent weekends and some summer vacations at Heany air base. Occasionally, we were allowed to accompany trainee pilots and their instructors on flights. My first flight was at very short notice and I had to run for a plane that was about to take off. As we taxied out I noticed that both the pilot and the instructor had parachutes. No one had thought of giving me one. We had a bumpy flight and I very nearly vomited. My fear that in an emergency the two others would take to their parachutes and leave me behind did little to calm my stomach. Back on the firm ground of Matabeleland we were given lessons in aerial navigation. Once I was even asked to navigate a plane from Bulawayo to Gwelo and back. I did my calculations conscientiously and called bearings to the pilot. The instructor checked each calculation and complimented me: I wasn’t sending them into the Kalahari Desert. This, we had learnt, was the most common beginner’s mistake: a miscalculation by 180°. Many pilots on their first solo flight had to make emergency landings in the desert when they ran out of fuel. But when we got back to terra firma the young trainee pilot deflated my ego. ‘Don’t imagine, kid, that I followed your instructions. Visibility was good. I just followed the line of rail.’ Our fortnight at the air base was fun. Our tents were erected among the officers’ quarters. Perhaps the authorities felt that our boyish virginity was not safe among the ‘chooms’. This was the nickname given to the later waves of RAF recruits. The earliest had come from the class that provided ‘officers and gentlemen’, but RAF losses were heavy and soon working-class lads from the North were being sent out. Their northern pronunciation of the word ‘chum’ became their sobriquet. They were not popular among Rhodesian whites because they let down the master race: many ignored Rhodesian sexual taboos. One could find them at night in the Bulawayo park making love to black or brown women. I am afraid my townie schoolmates gave them a hard time – sneaking around the park 146

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN flashing powerful torches. We boarders only participated vicariously in these amusements. Shortly after our return from Heany air base ‘Putt’ Jackson, the geography master, called me. He was in charge of the air cadets. He said he had something embarrassing to say: I could not continue as an air cadet. The RAF had discovered that I was an enemy alien. I started to protest but he interrupted. ‘Look, I do know your background. Moreover, I’ve told them that even if you had been a Nazi spy, what information could you pass to Herr Himmler? I’ve tried my damnedest. There’s nothing more I can do. I’ll get you transferred to the medicals. First aid is always useful.’ So I learnt about bandages and stretcher bearing and what to do in case of snakebite and eventually even acquired two stripes as the sergeant in charge of the medical platoon. That was embarrassing because when I gave the command ‘Squad – Halt!’ I frequently gave it on the wrong foot and threw the platoon into disarray. I had never gone through the required initial training but was ashamed to admit this so late in my military career. But I soon learnt to cope by delegating: ‘Corporal! March this squad to the drill hall.’ In the four years I spent at boarding school I do not think I ever got to talk to a black man. There was a set of lockers with numbered flaps where we placed our boots. One could peep through these lockers into the room beyond and see black men busily shining boots, but we got no closer to them. They polished the floors of our dormitories while we were away in class. They washed and ironed our clothes somewhere out of sight. I search my memory and can remember only one brief conversation in four years at that school. Two mates and I were swotting for an exam. One was a farmer’s son, an Afrikaner called van Straaten. We walked up and down the cricket field asking each other questions. Two black men were pulling a roller over the pitch. They were chatting in an African language. Van Straaten listened for a moment, then turned to them and joined in their conversation. They stood open-mouthed for a moment, then a rapid exchange developed. Eventually one of the Africans turned to the two of us bystanders and told us in Fanagalo that if he had not seen the young bwana’s face, he would have sworn he was talking to a Shona. And he pulled a finger across his throat in that expressive gesture that means ‘Slit my throat if I am not telling the truth’. There were, at Pioneer House, a number of boys who spoke one or other African language fluently, but this did not appear to bring them 147

RHODESIA closer to Africans: they regarded blacks as hewers of wood and drawers of water. God had made whites superior and blacks were there to serve them. They would neither have dreamt of querying this nor imagined that it might ever change, certainly not within their lifetime. I could never accept this. I had after all been the member of a helot race a few short years earlier. I had found myself transposed to member of a master race without any effort or deserts of my own. I declared that I was a communist without having any very precise idea what it meant except, I thought, the brotherhood of man. My declaration shocked people. I enjoyed that. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Bulawayo – the Place of Slaughter – had been the capital of Lobengula, the king of the Ndebele. The whites called them Matabele. He had been defrauded, outwitted and outgunned by Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Our scout troop camped in the Matopo hills. It was an improbable landscape – round granite hills shaped like domes and, perched on top of many such domes, another round rock, and occasionally yet another, balanced precariously on that one. It was as if, in child-like games, gods or giants had piled boulder onto boulder. We visited the grave of Cecil Rhodes, the founder. Around the campfire that evening our scoutmaster told us how, in the midst of war, the great man had gone, unarmed, into these mountains to parley with the Ndebele indunas and had brought peace to the land. Nobody told us that Rhodes’s minions had provoked war intentionally in the first place. When Rhodes knew he was dying he had chosen, for his tomb, a breathtaking site among these hills. It had a view over range after range of similar hills. Indeed, it was as if from up there one could overlook the entire world. There was a precedent for his choice: he had followed the example of Mzilikazi, the founder of the Ndebele nation. He too had been buried there. When Rhodes’s coffin was hauled up these mountains thousands of the defeated Ndebele rose to their feet and hailed him as they would have greeted their own kings: ‘Nkosi!’ Or so our scoutmaster told us. A short distance from Rhodes’s grave stood the memorial to Allan Wilson and his patrol, recording 34 names. The inscription was imperially terse: ‘THERE WERE NO SURVIVORS’. Again, it was a story I first heard around a Matopo campfire. I found it moving. It palled a little when I heard it repeated each year on Rhodes and Founders Day. Our cadet corps would be marched to town and lined up in front of 148

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN the city hall. A local worthy would then recall the deeds of these 34: after the battle of Egodade they had pursued the defeated Lobengula, the son of Mzilikazi, hoping to capture him alive. They had, however, been encircled by Ndebele impis and overwhelmed. They fought until they ran out of ammunition. The last few left alive then stood up and sang as the black warriors with their gleaming assegais closed in on them. Did they sing ‘God Save the Queen’ or ‘Nearer my God to thee’? They had acquitted themselves like men. Their black adversaries, we were told, had said of them: ‘they were men indeed!’ These Ndebele were connoisseurs of courage. Half a century after the battle one of my colleagues in the Central African Broadcasting Service discovered and interviewed several aged Ndebele survivors of that engagement. They said that, towards the end, the Wilson patrol had behaved oddly. They had waved white cloth instead of fighting. ‘We thought it was some kind of white man’s juju. We killed them anyway.’ I hated having my illusions shattered. The Ndebele were connoisseurs of courage. At Egodade their impis had charged machine guns – wave after wave of them – knowing full well that they stood no chance. Their losses were twice as heavy as those of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. ‘Quit you like men’ was part of their ethos as well. Of course we whites had won in the end, as our superior civilization entitled us to do. Evidence of our superiority was mounted on a pedestal in the centre of Bulawayo: a Maxim gun – the prototype machine gun – one of the first ever used in battle. But perhaps the spirits of those slaughtered warriors had the last laugh: Rhodes’s company had provoked the war to seize areas believed to hold massive seams of gold – ‘riches beyond the dreams of avarice’ – more than the Witwatersrand. It was an illusion. In the first five years after the occupation, Rhodesia yielded less gold than the Witwatersrand did in one day! The shareholders lost money. I remember lying in our dormitory listening to a pounding in the distance. ‘What’s that noise?’ I asked. ‘A gold mine,’ said Kevin Curran, the cricketer. I said he was talking nonsense. I imagined gold mines were deep underground and on a vast scale, like those of the Witwatersrand. He said he would show me he was right. The following afternoon several of us sneaked out of the school grounds just beyond the running track. We crossed the Bulawayo racecourse, strode over a mile of dry veld and there found a small hoist and a hole going into a hillock: a gold mine! One white sitting on an upturned bucket was supervising a dozen blacks – within two miles of our school. There were, said Kevin, a dozen such ‘small workers’ around 149

RHODESIA his own hometown. They didn’t get rich, he said, or only very rarely. Hope kept them going. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ So many different models of manhood! In Breslau our models had been martyrs, steadfast in their Jewish faith – like the Jews of York who burnt themselves to death rather than accept conversion to Christianity. More easily emulated were the bronzed kibbutzniks of Palestine, they who made the stony desert bloom. At Milton it was sportsmen. Now, in Bulawayo, the Place of Slaughter, I found still more models. After many defeats, the fortunes of war were turning. This was, undoubtedly, largely due to the Red Army. People were full of admiration for the men and women of the Soviet Union. ‘They fight with such heroism because the country belongs to them … to them and not to capitalists. They are defending a brave new world.’ Was this only Soviet propaganda? Or was it an apparently rational deduction, given that our information was so limited? It was not until many years later that we learnt about the massive defections from Soviet armies in the first weeks of the war. Perhaps German broadcasts reported the existence of the Vlasov army. But which of us would have believed the Nazis? I was ‘adopted’ by two girls four or five years older than I. I shall call them Miriam and Jane. One was Jewish, the other was not. They belonged to a left-wing group and apparently saw me as a potential recruit. Their group did, however, meet in the evenings and Milton Senior would not have given me an ‘exit’ to attend. For a symphony orchestra, yes: for a Bolshevik meeting, never. But on Sundays I could go to Miriam’s parents’ home and there the three of us would talk for hours about the advanced minorities’ policies of the Soviet Union, about collective farms in the Soviet Union and Palestine and about the coming world revolution. I do not recall that we talked much about the racial problems of Rhodesia. They lent me books, including the history of the Bolshevik party written by Stalin himself – or so it was said. I was disappointed. It was excruciatingly dull. By contrast, some essays by Trotsky, which someone else lent me, were lively and stimulating. My two tutors explained that undoubtedly Stalin’s heavy didactic style was the correct way of explaining complicated issues to the Soviet masses. My criticism was one of my bourgeois hang-ups, which I had to struggle to overcome. Even in that naïve flush of enthusiasm for the fatherland of the workers I did have nagging doubts. On Saturday afternoons Milton 150

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN School sometimes permitted us to go to the cinema. The newsreels showed massed marchers in Red Square in Moscow. Adoringly, they hailed the great leader. The all-white audience applauded. Captured Nazi flags were hurled into the gutter in a Roman triumph. I felt uncomfortable. To me this looked too similar to the newsreels of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. Besides, there was that Nazi–Soviet pact. Of course we knew it was tactically justified. But … What redeemed Stalin in my eyes, for a while at least, was a story I read: he was making a long speech at a party congress but interrupted it once, twice, three times to drink a glass of water. At the fourth such interruption the audience started to titter. Stalin, according to the story, chuckled: ‘excuse me, comrades, I had pickled herrings for lunch.’ This was not some remote tyrant but a man of the people. Half term came and Miriam and Jane invited me to accompany them for a weekend at a small outstation. Their host to be, they told me, was a wonderful man, a Hungarian, an intellectual and a revolutionary. I shall call him Dr Almassy. He was the local medical officer. What they did not tell me was that he also had a reputation as a great womanizer. I was, I think, taken along as the Anstandswauwau. It was a term I learnt from grandmother Sophie – a ‘respectability doggy’. In her youth no respectable young lady would wish to be seen walking unchaperoned with a man, but, grandmother joked, a little Wauwau could lend an air of respectability to such a tryst. Dr Almassy was a handsome, broad-shouldered, vigorous man. He bore no resentment at my uninvited presence but took steps to neuter it. He had a large house. I was put to sleep in the guest wing while the two young women were accommodated in a bedroom adjoining his own. Whatever went on that night, I did not bark. The doctor and I got on well: he loved an audience. And what an appreciative listener I was! He had studied medicine at Bologna but had returned to Hungary to fight on the side of Béla Kun in the Hungarian red rising of 1919. He had manned barricades and had fine tales about those heroic days. After the collapse of the rising he escaped the white terror and went back to Italy. He found a job that suited him well. He became the medical officer (or perhaps one of several) supervising the health of Rome’s prostitutes. Mussolini’s regime had eventually expelled him and he retained a fierce resentment. ‘Italy is the most wonderful country in the world,’ he said. ‘Whereas this,’ and he dismissed with a wave of his hand the parched dusty veld of Matabeleland. Mussolini had his comeuppance: when the corpses of the Duce and 151

RHODESIA his mistress were displayed on meat hooks in a Milan square our doctor bought 100 copies of the Bulawayo Chronicle, cut out the gruesome pictures and papered the walls of his study with them. I must have flinched when I saw this. He told me that to be a man and a revolutionary I would have to overcome my bourgeois squeamishness. Quit you … Dr Almassy was responsible for the health of the African population of a district the area of Belgium – the only doctor, he told me. Although he disliked Matabeleland, so unlike Emilia Romagna, he worked at his job with dedication. Immediately after breakfast that Sunday morning he set out on a round of outlying dispensaries and invited me to accompany him. Miriam and Jane stayed behind to prepare our lunch. I doubt whether any other government medical officer in Rhodesia was on the road at that hour on a Sunday. In the car he talked about local health problems, about the failed Hungarian revolution and about the beautiful prostitutes of Rome. The land was parched and dusty. The dust entered our nostrils. We passed African hovels roofed with rusting bits of metal – flattened paraffin tins. At every rural dispensary we found lines of patients squatting on the baked earth – dull-eyed men in tattered trousers and frayed jackets, downcast and humble. They might have squatted there patiently waiting for the end of the world. And yet these were Ndebele. They had once been the terror of the world. Perhaps some of these shrunken old men had been among the gleaming warriors who had charged the Maxim guns at Egodade. Defeat, and age, had robbed them of dignity. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ At weekends I had considerable freedom. The Bulawayo Jewish community were generous in their invitations. I think they were convinced that we boarders were being starved, which was not true. Boarding school food was bad, but there was lots of it. One household I liked to visit was that of Khaver Gotz. Khaver is the Hebrew for comrade. He too considered himself a revolutionary though when I met him he was an insurance agent. Not a successful one, I heard. He had to limit his business to clients with whom he could communicate in Russian or German or Yiddish. His English was poor and always remained so. I think it was his wife who earned the larger part of their living. Gotz too was delighted to have a young admirer happy to listen to his stories. He invited me to drop in any time. ‘There is always a 152

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN meal here for a comrade.’ In the Ukraine, shortly after 1917, he had joined a prototype kibbutz. Young Jews under the leadership of Joseph Trumpeldor were training for settlement in Palestine. Years later this same Trumpeldor was killed defending a Jewish settlement in Palestine against Arab attackers. The Zionist right proclaimed him a hero and martyr. This infuriated Gotz. ‘That man was an exemplary socialist,’ he told me, shaking his fist. ‘And an internationalist! And now those bloody fascists pretend he was one of them!’ He told me stories of Trumpeldor’s style of leadership. The comrades shared a dormitory on their Ukrainian ‘kibbutz’. They would lie in their beds arguing much of the night about the shape of the coming Utopia. Quotes from Marx, Kautsky and Bernstein were flung from bed to bed. Many of the khaverim would smoke and drop the butts of their cigarettes by the side of their beds. Then Comrade Trumpeldor would get out of bed in the bitter cold, pick up all the stubs and carry them into the even more bitter cold outside. ‘And you know, he had only one arm. He’d lost the other serving in the tsar’s army. But from that day on no comrade ever dropped a cigarette butt in our dormitory.’ Gotz told me about meetings of a secret Narodnik circle. I think he may have been a member of the Russian populist party before switching to Zionist socialism. The group decided to send agitators into the rural areas. The first was their best speaker – a tall, thin Russian. He came back a few days later minus several teeth but plus a black eye. What had happened? He had gone into a Ukrainian inn, climbed on a table and started his peroration: ‘down with the tsar.’ This, he hoped, would attract the attention of the boozers. He never got much further. The peasants beat the hell out of him. What to do? The group decided to send a powerfully built Ukrainian. Reactionary lackeys would have to think twice before daring to grapple with the likes of him. But he too came back some days later severely mauled. At this point Shmuel Finkelstein said he would go. The comrades said he was stark staring mad: he was puny, dark haired and wore thick glasses. But worst of all he had a large Jewish nose. Shmuel thanked them for their flattering remarks but said he could look after himself. Two weeks passed, then three. His comrades gave him up for dead – one more martyr for the cause. At the end of the third week Shmuel was brought back in a peasant cart. He was smiling and sitting on a load of cabbages and potatoes and beetroot, which he had received as gifts – even some home-brewed vodka. His report, as relayed by Gotz, went something like this:

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RHODESIA Well, I sat down in a pub with a glass of vodka and asked: ‘Who is the cleverest man in all Russia?’ You know how our peasants love a riddle. They suggested various names. I shook my head and offered half a bottle to any man who got it right. They suggested various holy abbots but again I shook my head. ‘So tell us, Yid, who is the cleverest man in all Russia?’ ‘It’s our little father, the tsar.’ ‘Ah,’ they said, ‘you are right, absolutely right. Long may he live: the tsar!’ I nodded and repeated: ‘long may he live.’ They agreed. Then I said it again. ‘Long may he live!’ ‘Yes, yes,’ they said, ‘but why are you repeating yourself, Yid? Have you heard anyone say that he is ill?’ ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said, ‘but I’m still worried.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, how can we be certain that the tsarevich will be as clever and as wise and as good as his father? After all, we’ve had some who weren’t. Think of Pyotr. His own tsarina had to have him done in.’ ‘That’s true,’ they said, ‘but the future is in the hands of God. There’s nothing man can do about it.’ ‘Well’, I replied, ‘things aren’t quite so hopeless. There are ways. You see, in countries like America the common people – fellows like you and me – vote for their tsars.’ Another role model. Three and a half decades later, at the height of Soviet power, I found myself responsible for the BBC’s East European broadcasts. There were many critics – members of parliament, journalists, even diplomats – who tried to pressure us into a more aggressive tone in our broadcasts, the equivalent (I thought) of jumping on the table and shouting ‘down with the tsar’. I always resisted that approach. Gotz’s stories were at their best when delivered in his vivid, sonorous Yiddish. If I have freed myself from the widespread German– Jewish distaste for Yiddish, this is in large part thanks to him. I never asked him why he had landed up in Bulawayo, an insurance agent, when he might have been an acclaimed pioneer in the Holy Land. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ One weekend I was at Miriam’s house for coffee. Both she and Jane virtually ignored my presence in their excitement about a new book. One of them had just finished it; the other was then reading it. The 154

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN book was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, his novel about the Soviet purge trials of old Bolsheviks. Not until the following weekend did I manage to borrow their copy. Koestler, earlier in his career, had sympathized with the ideals of the Russian revolution – as we then did. His hero Rubashov is an old guard Bolshevik, the very representative of these ideals. But he is tortured and destroyed by the brutality of Stalin’s reign. The book is about the destruction of the ideals we too, in remotest Africa, held dear. Reading Darkness at Noon brought to an abrupt end my schoolboy flirtation with Stalinism. Koestler himself reports that on first publication, in 1940, his book caused little stir and sold no more than 4000 copies in Britain. In France it was only published after the war, but there it broke all previous publishing records and played a major part in the defeat of the communists in a constitutional referendum, which might, conceivably, have brought them to power. But several years earlier his book had made quite as powerful an impact on a little group of youngsters in Southern Rhodesia. It made no difference at all to the political scene in Rhodesia. As for me, never before or since has the reading of one single book made such a difference to my own thinking. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ At the end of my time at Milton I had to face competitive examinations for bursaries for university studies. My parents could not afford to send me to university. The school proposed entering me for a scholarship donated by a millionaire, Alfred Beit, one of Rhodes’s closest collaborators and a German Jew. However, they discovered that I was six weeks too old to enter. The principal helped me to write an appeal: it was precisely because I was of the same origin as the late Mr Beit that I had had to emigrate from Germany. I had lost nearly two years by changing schools and languages. I waited. Some weeks later the headmaster told me that the trustees’ decision would be communicated to me after I had sat the exam. It was vital that I should do well. A good result might persuade them to waive the age stipulation. What follows was told to me years later by one of my former masters: the headmaster had, in fact, received the trustee’s rejection well before I had to sit the exam but had decided to withhold this information. My teachers continued to encourage me to work hard and I did. Apparently I came top in the tests. Armed with this result the headmaster approached the Bulawayo rabbi and the Northern Rhodesian European education department. The Northern Rhodesia 155

RHODESIA government offered me an interest-free loan that covered more than half the costs of my university education. A group of Bulawayo Jews, prodded by the rabbi, provided the other half. The man who raised and managed the second half of the fund was a barrister, one Ben Baron. I had never met him, but a few months earlier I had read about his father in an editorial in the Bulawayo Chronicle. The government was, at that stage, proposing new immigration regulations. Potential immigrants would have to (1) be literate (2) have a sound command of the English language and (3) prove that they had a certain amount of capital. The editorial focused on Baron Snr: the old man had arrived half a century earlier penniless, without speaking English and unable to read the Latin alphabet, though he could read Hebrew. This man, said the editorial, would have been disqualified on every single count by the proposed legislation. And yet Baron had produced three sons who had done the state some service: one (if I remember correctly) had been the most senior officer in the small Rhodesian air force. The second was a well-known surgeon. The third was a prominent barrister – my benefactor. I am told the Talmud says it is wrong to thank a giver of charity. He is doing his duty and is laying up treasure in heaven. So I shall not dwell on my gratitude to Ben Baron. But I remain impressed by the actions of the Northern Rhodesian European education department. They had no Talmudic prodding. I was technically an enemy alien, but they offered me an interest-free loan without which I might never have been able to study. I have said many critical things about British colonial administration. There will be many more to come. But I must also set down that among its functionaries there were men of a rare largeness of spirit. More role models?

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Chapter 8

Red thug? Johannesburg: a grand flight of steps rises to the mock-classical façade of the University of the Witwatersrand. Two large black limousines drive up. Aides jumped out of the second and run forward to open the doors of the first. They help out an elderly man: Dr Daniel François Malan, the new prime minister. With a slow shuffle he approaches the steps. Crowded on either side, all the way up, we stand, several hundred students. The prime minister has difficulty climbing the steps; I think he had a heart problem. An aide takes his arm. As he reaches the second or third step the assembled students do an about-turn. We turn our backs to the newly elected prime minister of South Africa. I say ‘we’. Only looking back do I realize that this was new for me, this we. At school I had been an oddball, never really quite one of the boys. Here at university I found myself one of many. Of course we had our differences. We argued. But it was, by and large, a crowd of likeminded youngsters. I have no old photos of that scene, or a list of those present, but I am certain that among ‘us’ were men and women who, in later years, did much to bring down the apartheid regime. Joe Slovo was almost certainly there – he who became chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. His future wife, Ruth First, assassinated in Mozambique by a letter bomb, was there. So was Harold Wolpe who years later, charged with treason, made a spectacular escape from prison. About him I am certain because it was he who tipped me off about what was planned. Slovo, First, Wolpe and many others were then or later became members of the Communist Party. This made me antagonistic towards them, especially towards Slovo. I detested his dour, hard Stalinism. I was surprised when, years later, a common acquaintance told me that Slovo (who had just died) had had a delightful sense of humour and been a superb raconteur. I disputed this, but when I came to read his autobiography I did find that he was a fine raconteur. But in that book he admitted that as a young man he had been, well, dour. Why did so many of the brightest become commies? I found that difficult to stomach after Darkness at Noon. But to them it seemed that only a 157

RHODESIA communist revolution could dislodge South Africa’s powerfully entrenched and brutal regime. I played no glorious role in bringing down apartheid: I ‘was only an attendant lord’ and even that only briefly. I never considered South Africa my home. My years there were merely an interim between two worlds that are the subject of this book – that of German Jewry and that of British colonialism: worlds that have disappeared. Had Dr Malan visited one of the Afrikaans-media universities – Pretoria or Stellenbosch – he would have received a rapturous welcome: Here was the man who, at long last, had revenged the defeat of the Afrikaner nation by the rapacious, money-grubbing English. Perhaps the victors had forgotten the Boer War. The defeated certainly had not. Moreover, Malan was a man who would keep blacks in their proper God-ordained place, a position they were increasingly challenging. But the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was different. Malan’s racial policies did not endear him to us. Neither did the sympathy that many of his followers had shown for Hitler. A large proportion of Wits students were ‘Liberals’. The student body was English-speaking with a sizeable minority of Jews and a sprinkling of blacks, Indians and ‘Coloureds’. Yes, I had black fellow students. There were none in my own classes because most were studying medicine. However, we met in canteens and in university societies. We mixed easily within the university precincts. At least, so it seemed to me. But outside we could never go into a pub together. Inviting a black fellow student home was difficult. They were subject to evening curfews. And what would the neighbours say? But one of my black acquaintances, Woody M took a number of us whites to a shebeen. He thought it might do us some good to get to know the real world. A miserable slum dwelling: I remember drinking my whisky perched on the edge of a bed in which a five-year-old little girl was soundly asleep. Woody taught us one useful lesson that night: when you order a bottle of whisky in a shebeen, turn it upside down first, then wait. If a drop or two trickles through the cap, refuse the bottle. A hypodermic syringe has been used to extract the hard stuff and to substitute tea! Though ‘we’ detested the government of Dr Malan we had not been enthusiastic about that of his predecessor, General Smuts. That too had been racist and oppressive. Malan created the legal framework of apartheid, but de facto the system had existed long before. Non-whites were denied employment in skilled jobs and herded into miserable 158

RED THUG? slum townships or into infertile rural reserves. They were subjected to movement controls and humiliation by a particularly brutal police force. I saw that police force in action several times: rural yobs lashing out with batons at anyone with a black face. In later years they graduated to whips and machine guns mounted high on armoured cars. I always thought that Davel, my murderous classmate, had missed his true vocation. There were puzzling contradictions about South Africa: in British Northern Rhodesia (where lip service was paid to a policy of the primacy of native interests) the treatment of non-Europeans was, in many ways, worse. Before the Malan government enforced residential segregation in South Africa, there were mixed-race areas in towns like Johannesburg and Cape Town. In Northern Rhodesia residential segregation was total and many European-owned shops served Africans through small hatches in side walls. I never saw similar hatches in South Africa during the apartheid era. I suspect this was because African purchasing power was greater. I have been told that such hatches existed in certain rural areas. In Northern Rhodesia, however, they were everywhere. Certainly African wages were higher in South Africa and the education provided, though ill funded and inadequate, was more extensive than in Northern Rhodesia. As early as the 1890s South Africa had some schools that educated blacks to university entrance levels. In Northern Rhodesia this did not happen until the 1950s. The South African Native College – later the university of Fort Hare – had existed since 1916. There was also a higher level of technical skills. When Malan’s government introduced legislation to reserve skilled jobs for whites, it was widely ignored because blacks had skills that employers needed. In Johannesburg I lived with my uncle Friedrich and his family. Friedrich was the uncle who had been hounded out of the Breslau law courts by Nazi bullyboys. In Johannesburg he became a small manufacturer of chemical products. Chemistry had always been his hobby. When Malan’s new apartheid legislation came into force I asked him ‘Aren’t the jobs in your factory now reserved for whites?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am breaking the law. But so is every other manufacturer in this country – certainly the small ones. If we kept within the law we would all go bankrupt.’ Despite our doubts about the earlier Smuts government, some of us had campaigned for him in the elections, which he had just lost. I had gone out with two carloads of students. We had driven to a rural township in the Transvaal where there were said to be many Afrikaner 159

RHODESIA ex-servicemen who had served in the Western Desert, which meant that these Afrikaners were not Hitler sympathizers. We had pasted up posters that identified the National Party with the Nazis. The posters had been published by an ex-serviceman’s organization called the Springbok Legion. It was a communist front organization though I did not know it at the time. If I had, it would have made me feel uncomfortable, but I think insufficiently uncomfortable to prevent me pasting up their posters. Stalin was far away. Malan was very near. At that time there remained a few mixed-race trade unions in the land. Best known among them was the Garment Workers’ Union. It had white and coloured (mixed-race) members, mainly women. As far as I know they did not go so far as to admit blacks. I certainly did not see any the night I became a ‘red thug’. The Garment Workers’ Union was holding a rally in the Johannesburg town hall to protest against new legislation that would ban mixed-race unions. Two Nazi-style organizations – the Greyshirts and the Ossewa Brandwag (ox wagon fire sentinels) – called on their supporters to disrupt the meeting. The Springbok Legion called on Wits students to support the garment workers. Again it was Harold Wolpe who recruited me. We were given white armbands with red letters saying ‘Steward’. We were instructed to admit to the hall only people who could show a Garment Workers’ Union membership card. There were scuffles as brawny miners, trucked in from outlying mining townships, tried to force their way in. They were certainly not garment workers. Stones were thrown. Glass doors shattered and the splinters flew around us. We used folded newspapers to protect our faces. Eventually the miners did ram their way through a back door, but we had held them off long enough. The meeting had, by then, voted overwhelmingly to remain multiracial. Next morning one of the Afrikaans-language papers reported that ‘thugs sporting red armbands’ had prevented the views of noncommunist workers from being heard! I had a false start at university, in the engineering faculty. Eventually I majored in English and history. We had some stimulating teachers. One, an Afrikaner, was the historian J. S. Marais. He stammered badly so that it was painful to attend his lectures. However, I soon discovered his incisiveness, especially of his writing. At that time G. M. Theal’s five-volume History of South Africa was still widely regarded as the standard work. School history books were based on Theal. He was a staunch apologist for the early settlers in their disputes with the Dutch East India Company. The settlers were, in his view, heroic fighters for liberty against a company that was autocratic 160

RED THUG? and oppressive. In a slim monograph* of fewer than 150 pages Marais re-examined a key confrontation between the two sides. The company was, in a modest way, trying to protect the indigenous people. He proved Theal’s judgement faulty. But worse, Theal had suppressed evidence that did not fit his prejudices. I found the stammering Marais’s iconoclasm very impressive. I did little work at university and in my finals did not cover myself with glory. I was imitating what I had learnt about the life of students in Germany in those happy years before the First World War. I heard about it from my father and, at second hand, from grandfather Goldschmidt. My mother told me she had once asked her father why he placed so much importance on the people around him being ‘Akademiker’. Wasn’t that just snobbery? He replied that university was vital for a young man – not because of what was taught there but because it gave him a few years to read, to exchange ideas and, perhaps, even to think. (Yet he never gave it a thought that university might also have benefited his two daughters.) I found it easy to fall in with this ‘gaudeamus igitur’ attitude. Coming from poor refugee parents and studying on borrowed money I should have taken my studies more seriously. But then, grandfather Goldschmidt too had been poor and had studied on borrowed money. I did have a part-time job for a while, as a proofreader for the weekly Zionist Record. Once I did a stint of interviewing on soft-drink consumption for a market research firm, but most of my spare time (and some that should not have been spare) went on other pursuits: I read all of Shaw and Ibsen, some Rabindranath Tagore, Dostoyevsky, Heine, Goethe and various other German writers. I helped to edit a literary quarterly, Criteria. It only appeared once, but it did publish the first short story by Nadine Gordimer (or at least one of the very earliest). For the second issue I had selected a short story by a still unknown Southern Rhodesian woman, Doris Lessing. Alas, there was no second issue. We had run out of money. I wrote bad poetry and debated. I was more successful as a debater than as a poet. At the end of my studies I was selected to head a team of three South African students to debate at British universities. My winning speech had opposed the incorporation of the high commission territories – Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Basutoland – into the Union of South Africa. The Malan government had reopened this * J. S. Marais, Maynier and the First Boer Republic, Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1944.

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RHODESIA long-festering controversy. It was a case of a clash of the interests of white settlers and those of the African peoples. A not dissimilar issue was to overshadow the next seven years of my life. Our debating tour was fun, though exhausting. Over five weeks we spoke four or five evenings a week – touring from Southampton to Aberdeen. I lost half a stone in weight. I learnt to admire the stamina of politicians who, during that same period, were engaged in the 1951 British election campaign. They had to address four or five meetings a day! But I suppose they were wise enough to avoid booze-ups each evening. Moreover, I expect, their speeches were repetitive whereas we had to speak on a variety of subjects not of our own choosing. That needed preparation: that ‘the English are a pagan race’, that ‘Africa should be left to the Africans’, that ‘the British Empire is on the way to dissolution’, that ‘this house approves of the Victorians’, that ‘this house should adjourn for a drink’. But, as we had anticipated, most frequently we were called upon to debate South Africa’s racial policies. There were three of us, but no one had any sympathy for the apartheid policies of the new government. Nevertheless, our hosts expected that one of us should defend them. We drew lots. It fell to me to speak in favour of apartheid at the Oxford Union. I reminded myself that my father had often told me that a lawyer has an obligation to defend his clients, however villainous. Ranged against me were students like the young Jeremy Thorpe. Robin Day, too, was among the ‘paper speakers’ but I cannot remember on which side he spoke. I did my best. My side lost, but by a far narrower margin than anticipated: one-third voted in support of apartheid! I flattered myself that this was due to my brilliant advocacy. Later I came to understand that, in all probability, the contrariness of British students had far more to do with it. At the end of the debate and before the usual drinking session a middle-aged man approached me and shook my hand. He introduced himself as the public relations officer of the South African high commission. Would I, he asked, be interested in working with them? I was not tempted.

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Chapter 9

Becoming a bwana The road dipped suddenly and narrowed to a bridge barely a foot wider than our Chevrolet – a bridge crudely constructed of sawn logs. Champagnya’s speed never slackened. He drove the car at a steady 60 miles per hour. Any other driver would have slowed down, not he. His judgement of space and distance was totally confident. Our boss, Captain Berrington, said the man was the best driver he had ever come across. ‘If he hadn’t been so damn good, we’d have fired him long ago. The old boozer.’ I no longer remember our driver’s real name, even though I made out his payslips for nearly two years. Everyone called him by the bubbly he claimed to have consumed by the case when he served with the Eighth Army. Rommel’s retreating forces had left behind cases of fine French wine. In Northern Rhodesia he had to content himself with kaffir beer made of fermented millet because, at that time, it was illegal for an African to consume European liquor. Not that this ensured Champagnya’s sobriety. From time to time he failed to turn up, usually after payday, or if he did he sat in the shade of a tree, morosely holding his head. By the rules and regulations of General Orders and Financial Regulations he should have been fired but Captain Berrington (not his real name) came from the permissive Kenya Highlands and would not hear of it. ‘Champagnya,’ he addressed him sternly before our trip, ‘on safari no drinking. You hear me?’ ‘Bwana Captain,’ said Champagnya, ‘you know that I don’t … not even the day before we go.’ Champagnya and I were to drive from Lusaka to Kawambwa – a distance something like halfway across Europe – not on smooth, tarred motorways but on abominable corrugated earth tracks. In the rainy season they became impassable. ‘Can we really do such a distance in two days?’ I had asked, looking at the map on the boss’ wall. ‘Maybe if he and I were to share the driving?’ ‘Don’t try,’ said Berrington. ‘You’ve only just got your driving 163

RHODESIA licence – right? I got mine when you were still in nappies. But Champagnya won’t let me share the driving. He’ll get you there in two days.’ And Berrington told me about Champagnya’s skills as a mechanic: they had once had a broken fuel pipe in the middle of nowhere. Champagnya had traipsed to the nearest village and had found an old wrecked bicycle. He had sawed off a bit of the brake handle and had used the metal tubing to join the two ends of the broken fuel pipe. He had then scored the bark of a nearby tree, collected the resin and sealed the joints. Driving to Kawambwa – or being driven – was my first trip away from the ‘line of rail’ – the area of European settlement. We left the flat, dull plateau and descended to lusher, greener valleys. The trees grew taller. I saw mango trees twice the height of any I had ever seen before; they spread out like old English oaks. We crossed rivulets on primitive bridges. When we came to larger rivers we had to stop. Champagnya would hoot vigorously and shout to get the ferrymen on the far shore to stir. Sometimes this took a quarter of an hour. Maybe they had been hoeing or sleeping or drinking. Eventually a team got together and poled over a homemade contraption – eight empty petrol drums lashed together to support a platform of roughly sawn planks. We drove onto this. Champagnya ordered me out of the vehicle. He had told me horror stories about cars that had rolled into rivers, drowning incautious passengers. He would not let the ferrymen start until blocks had been placed against all four wheels. There was a cable stretched across the stream. Two ferrymen hauled on this cable, while two others punted the ferry along with long poles. The wind whistled in the tall trees. At last I had got out of that dreary office. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I had started my career as the lowest form of life. Well, the lowest form of white official life. I was the accounts clerk in the office of the registrar of cooperative societies, NRG, which stands for Northern Rhodesia government. My salary was £390 per annum. Just back from my tour of British universities I was disappointed that I had not been offered anything grander. ‘Never mind applause at the Oxford Union,’ said Mr Lightfoot, the chief establishment officer ‘I want to see one or two good annual reports – here. After that we can discuss your future. I’ve seen too many Oxford firsts who were a disaster … hopelessly impractical or couldn’t work in a team. Let’s see what stuff you’re made of!’ 164

BECOMING A BWANA A few weeks after I started my new boss asked whether I had signed the book. What book? He explained that new civil servants were expected to sign a book kept in the guardroom at the entrance to Government House. I would then be invited to the next cocktail or garden party and meet ‘HE’ – His Excellency the Governor. I did as I was told and a month or two later was invited. This was not my first visit to the impressive neo-Georgian Government House. I had cycled there once or twice as a schoolboy to deliver jackets and trousers that Rhodesian Dry Cleaners had cleaned for an earlier incumbent. Deliveries were by a servants’ entrance. Now I walked in under the pillared portico at the front. An ADC took my invitation card and announced my name in resounding tones. I shook hands with Sir Gilbert Rennie. He said ‘How do you do?’ I murmured ‘Excellency’ and performed a slight bow, remembering not to click my heels Prussianstyle. I was then passed along the line to be greeted by Lady Rennie. I had learnt back at Lusaka Boys’ School not to refer to her as the governess. This was my sole conversation with HE and I do not think it made any major impact on imperial policies. And yet, Senti, our cook, was not altogether wrong. I had become a member of the master race, a bwana, albeit a very junior one. I worked in a ‘temporary’ wartime shack, which remained in use 20 years after the war: this was the co-ops’ HQ. In October our offices became unbearably hot as the sun beat down on the corrugated iron roof. We had to draw the faded green curtains to reduce the glare. The second summer I managed to secure some fans. We certainly had no air conditioning. I sat filing payment vouchers, typing out salary slips, adding up columns in account books, writing out requisitions for petrol and logging incoming mail. I pinned green ‘FOR ATTENTION’ or red ‘URGENT’ slips to letters and referred them to my seniors. Some I was allowed to answer myself, ending with ‘I am, Sir, your obedient servant’ and signing ‘p.p. Registrar of Cooperative Societies.’ I was bored. The accounting system was rigid, ridiculously rigid. Money budgeted for ‘Repair and Maintenance of Motor Vehicles’ could on no account be used for the repair and maintenance of buildings. Towards the end of the financial year 1952 we had spare money in ‘Transport and General’ but not a penny in ‘Building Repairs, Minor’. But the roof of our office block leaked. What to do? The boss advised me to buy Land Rover tyres with my surplus. Several of our African inspectors had to be sent on safari because we needed their office to store the tyres. Then I did the rounds of other departmental accounts clerks. I 165

RHODESIA found that the agricultural department had surplus funds in ‘Building Repairs, Minor’ but no money to buy tyres. We struck a deal. The coop roof was repaired and the cost was debited to agriculture. Agriculture sent over their Land Rovers and Champagnya replaced their worn tyres. Decades later, when I was involved with Soviet affairs, I read studies about the rigidities of the Stalinist accounting system. It was only the wheeling and dealing of professional ‘fixers’ that kept that system going. I realized that I, too, had once been such a fixer. Of course we always had the ‘goat bag’. The Soviets must have had something similar or else the system would have collapsed much earlier than it did. A goat bag was (so the story went) made from the scrotum of the animal. I never actually saw one because by my time goat bags had become a fictional construct. Moneys saved – in defiance of all regulations – from one project were said to have been hidden away in the goat bag and could then be used to finance essential work that had not been foreseen in the budget. It says something for the colonial service that I never once heard whispers that an officer had dipped his hands into a goat bag for his personal use. Not once, which is not to say they were totally incorruptible. My department trained ten African co-op supervisors in my first year. Before they could be sent on their rounds they had to have bicycles. Government lent them £12 each, to be deducted from their salaries in monthly instalments. It was my job to go and place an order for ten cycles with one of only two cycle stores in town, both owned by German Jews. When I had finalized the transaction the shopkeeper reached under his counter and produced a bottle of whisky, which he presented to me. I refused. He looked puzzled. When I told my father that evening he was outraged. ‘Bribing a public servant! You must report this to the police this very evening.’ I did not. My father said he was disappointed. I had shown a lack of integrity. The following year another lot of cycles had to be ordered. This time I very determinedly went to the competition. It was a bottle of brandy that appeared from under the counter. Again I refused. ‘What the hell!’ said the second shopkeeper, ‘you holier than the pope? Everybody who places such a large order gets a bottle of brandy. And nobody has ever refused.’ When I repeated this to my Prussian father he was speechless. In fact it was not the first such shock to his admiration for all 166

BECOMING A BWANA things British. Some time early in the war – 1941 or 1942 – a police officer had come to see him. ‘Dr Fraenkel,’ the man had said, ‘you remember we confiscated all cameras belonging to enemy aliens? Well, for the duration of the war. I’ve had a look at the cameras we hold at the police station. The best there is a Rolleiflex belonging to you. Now this war will last many more years. You won’t be able to use it. Would you sell it to me?’ My father refused indignantly. ‘That man is taking advantage of his official position,’ he said to us afterwards. ‘It’s corruption. This couldn’t happen in Germany.’ Little did he know! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My boss’s title – registrar of cooperative societies – bore no semblance to reality. On our shelves we had textbooks from England that I was advised to read. My bosses held out promises of my eventual promotion to cooperative supervisor. I had other ambitions, but, being bored, I did read the books they recommended. I learnt that it was a registrar’s duty to register cooperative societies once he was assured that they had a suitable constitution and that their accounts were audited annually. And that was about all, unless the auditor reported irregularities. In such cases the registrar was expected to intervene. This was, in fact, how it worked with the four or five existing European cooperative societies. They had been formed on the initiative of white mineworkers, usually Englishmen from the North or the Midlands – the areas where the cooperative movement had had its beginnings. Such co-ops received no more than the minimal supervision envisaged by the textbooks. But most of the department’s work was with African cooperatives. These were certainly not independent initiatives. Our department had created them. This meant thrusting unfamiliar institutions upon puzzled and uncomprehending people. Co-ops were part of a wave of reforms initiated by the 1945 Labour government. Organizers were sent out to teach Africans to run these cooperative enterprises. Profits would come back to the members and not go to foreign traders, mainly Indian. Wealth would flow into impoverished communities. I was enthusiastic about these initiatives, but my youthful idealism received some hard knocks as I got to learn about the real world, mainly from our white cooperative supervisors at ‘outstations’. In the beginning there was some tension between them and me. They thought their first priority should be to 167

RHODESIA get co-ops started and running efficiently. I thought they ought to send in their monthly accounts punctually. I often could not complete the departmental accounts because ‘outstation’ returns were months late. Reminders had little effect, so in the end Captain Berrington suggested I go out to the more recalcitrant outposts and spend a few days bringing their accounts up to date. And this is how I came to drive to faraway places with exotic names like Kawambwa and Petauke and Fort Rosebery sitting by the side of Champagnya, but never driving. Co-op supervisors took the opportunity to show me their work and convince me that getting their enterprises working ought to have priority over petty departmental accounts. In the evenings I would sit with them by the gloomy light of a hissing paraffin lamp learning to hold my gin and tonic and discovering how UK book theory and Kawambwa practice differed. These were not real cooperatives. White civil servants had taken the initiative to start them. They had drawn up constitutions and had then set out to find a few literates or semi-literates among the locals who could be coaxed into becoming committee members. They were usually government clerks, teachers, agricultural instructors or boma messengers. (The boma was the local district commissioner’s office.) It was hoped these, in turn, would enrol large numbers of rank-and-file members. They never did. The next hurdle was to raise working capital. According to the textbooks, members were supposed to contribute this capital. But these saw no reason why they should give their hard-earned ten shillings – two week’s wages for some – to finance some harebrained government scheme. In the end the supervisors compromised. They settled for one shilling: the remaining nine were to come from the first year’s bonus. Cooperative committee meetings were rare and farcical: white civil servants presided over them and steered the decisions. Sometimes they even considered such meetings a waste of time and took decisions without consultation. There were two types of co-ops: producers’ and consumers’. The consumers’ were a disaster. The producers’ were not – at least not always. Consumers’ co-ops were retail stores. They sold cloth, paraffin, matches, candles, sugar and sometimes bicycles. It was hoped they would undercut Indian traders who, in the remoter rural areas, worked to high profit margins. Co-op margins were set reasonably and profits were to be distributed to members as an end of year bonus. Over two years I read every report and balance sheet I had to file. I think there were no more than two or three pathetically small bonus 168

BECOMING A BWANA distributions among 40 or 50 consumer cooperatives. Bankruptcies were far more frequent. On the walls of every co-op there were posters in vernacular languages: ‘NO CREDIT’. I had had them printed on Captain Berrington’s instruction. They made not the slightest difference. The audits, after yet another co-op had gone broke, usually showed that the salesman had sold a lot of goods on credit, usually to committee members. He had been unable to resist their pressure. Later the committee members could not pay. There was little point in suing them. They had no means. Salesmen’s relatives were an even greater menace: African family duties are serious. A young salesman found it impossible to refuse credit to, say, his mother’s elder brother, a man he addressed as ‘father’. Not infrequently a salesman, seeing that the game was up, emptied the till and did a flit: ‘GONE CONGO’. But the members who lost their shillings of share capital blamed the government. Producer co-ops were different. They too were not real co-ops but many came to serve a useful function buying agricultural produce: maize, cassava, groundnuts, sweet potatoes or tobacco. Say one of our supervisors had succeeded in cajoling a total of £10 of working capital from a crowd of bemused peasants. On this basis he raised a government loan a hundred times larger to build a storage shed, to buy some jute sacks and weighing scales and, most important, a lorry. Then he encouraged the locals to grow surplus crops, bought these up and trucked them over primitive roads to the Copper Belt. Areas that had, until then, been limited to subsistence agriculture and to sending their young men away to work on the ‘line of rail’ now found money flowing in. There was no commercial tradition among Northern Rhodesian Africans. Members had little idea what was being done in their name. While the European supervisors were consulting HQ on what proportion of the year’s profits should be invested in gilt-edged shares as a cushion against future price fluctuations, the members had not realized that there were any surplus funds. One supervisor told me he had once incautiously mentioned a surplus. His committee had immediately demanded that this should be distributed – at once. He tried to tell them that there were grounds to expect that next year’s maize prices might be lower. They attributed a lower price to the ill will of Bwana Governor. But even though I learnt a lot about the difficulties of working with illiterate peasants, I often wondered when yet another cooperative 169

RHODESIA secretary made off with the funds whether this would have happened if he had actually been the secretary and not a figurehead and if the members could have been made to see that he had robbed them, not one of the white government’s crazy schemes. I spent many evenings in conversation with our white co-op supervisors. They were honest people. They lived simply in remote outstations. Salaries were not large. They worked moderately hard, though not excessively so. But no African was ever invited into their homes. So far as I know, no real conversation about what was wrong with the system ever developed. None of them appeared to puzzle why African tribal societies, which had the most elaborate structures of mutual aid and cooperation, did not take up co-ops. Nothing was ever built on indigenous institutions. I do not believe my seniors even knew they existed. I must admit that I, too, did not see it at the time. And yet I had always known that my childhood friend, Watson, the ‘petrol boy’, had been a member of a savings group – a sort of co-op. Two months out of three he handed over virtually his entire wages to two fellow Kaonde tribesmen. The third month he received, in effect, three months’ wages. This gave him enough cash to finance bigger expenditures – a suit, a bicycle, perhaps even the bride price for a wife. Our African inspectors must certainly have known all this far better than I, but in the 1950s Africans were rarely encouraged to voice their views or make suggestions. Possibly what they were taught on their training course was all very new and alien. It needed time before any of them could see ways of assimilating these new concepts to African traditions. Speaking with hindsight, one of the most useful things the cooperative department did was to run a one-year training course in bookkeeping, commercial practice and report writing for African inspectors. When independence came to Zambia, the men who had completed this course had a near monopoly of skills that were to be in great demand. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I liked my boss Captain Berrington. He was tall, handsome and slightly raffish. He had been a professional soldier. After the war he had settled in Kenya where he ran a white farmers’ cooperative. In Kenya he married the attractive Genevieve. She was blonde, vivacious and outrageously bawdy. When I first joined the co-ops, Berrington 170

BECOMING A BWANA was not yet the boss. My first boss was a Mr Brook-Williams (also a pseudonym). Double-barrel names conveyed status in colonial society, but I was the filing clerk so I knew that when he first came out to Africa he had been plain Mr Williams. The luscious Genevieve was his secretary but it did not take me long to realize that she was also his mistress. In fact, Berrington, Genevieve and their two charming little daughters shared Brook-Williams’s large head of department house. Mrs Brook-Williams had, according to gossip, decamped for England when her husband started the affair. On going to see the boss I would always knock conscientiously, wait, then knock a second time before entering, and still find Genevieve on his lap. He looked sheepish. She did not care a damn. She would come into my office, sit on the edge of my desk displaying her shapely long legs and tell me bawdy jokes that caused me to blush furiously, which amused her greatly. Captain Berrington appeared complaisant about her affair. I heard he was bedding a pretty young thing in the Theatre Club. Once the gorgeous Genevieve asked me to baby-sit for their two little daughters. A little while later, perhaps by way of recompense, she invited me to one of her parties. It was the first time I had penetrated that fast set of beautiful people. They were a minority in Lusaka: most of the civil servants came from the middle or lower middle classes and lived commonplace, respectable lives. I felt awkward and out of place in this ‘Kenya Highlands’ society. But I wished I had had the panache to get closer to some of the attractive girls at that party. Brook-Williams opted for early retirement a few months after I joined the department. Perhaps he found living in a ménage-à-trois difficult, or conceivably the chief establishment officer intervened. General Orders and Financial Regulations decreed that if an officer started to ‘notice’ his secretary he was to inform his personnel officer immediately. The noticed lady would then be transferred away from the noticing officer. After Brook-Williams’s departure Berrington was nominated head of department, but his wife was transferred to another department. That too was in accordance with General Orders and Financial Regulations. The office became a lot duller without Genevieve. Berrington got his title changed to commissioner for cooperative development, which reflected reality more closely. He was a reasonably conscientious civil servant. He worked from 8.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m., but never a minute longer. His real passion was amateur dramatics: he worked most weekends and often late into the night as 171

RHODESIA producer or stage manager at the Lusaka Theatre Club. He had himself raised funds to have the handsome little theatre built. On long vacation in England he got together other Lusaka amateurs who happened to be on furlough and they performed an Agatha Christie play somewhere in the Home Counties. Poor Berrington! A while after I left his department he slipped and fell to his death from the gangway, high over the stage of the little theatre he had helped to create. There were others in co-ops whom I liked less: Tim Russell, for example. He had been brought up in India as the son of an English businessman. I sat with him on the gauzed-in veranda of his house at Mumbwa watching the moon rising over the bush veld while he held forth on the inferiority of the dark races. ‘Look at the Namwala traders: the secretary has made off with the takings; that’s the third bugger-up we’ve had this year! Africans!’ He assured me that it would take centuries before they got any civilization and even longer before they acquired real integrity. Britain would have to maintain a firm control until then. The best thing to do with political agitators would be to string up the bloody lot. How much better it would have been for India if the viceroy, after locking up Gandhi, had thrown away the key. ‘I’ve seen it all happen: those shits at Westminster will scuttle out of here too, that is unless your settlers tell them where to get off.’ And yet, Russell did useful work. Talking to some Indian traders – he spoke Hindi well – he discovered that they imported their cooking ghee from India. After that he taught the Mumbwa cattle keepers’ cooperative how to make ghee and organized its transport and sale. Of course, the co-op members neither got any sense of participation nor learnt anything about commercial practices. However, thanks to his efforts, money did start to flow into an impoverished area. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The ‘Petauke affair’ was much discussed in our offices. There was an African tobacco growers’ cooperative at Petauke in the Eastern Province that produced Burley tobacco. A little distance further east, at Fort Jameson (now Chipata), was an area of European settlement where some 300 white farmers grew and cured Virginia tobacco. Virginia is, I learnt, more difficult to cure than Burley. Ovens need to be kept at a steady temperature for several weeks. On these farms there was no electricity so wood fires had to be stoked day and night. 172

BECOMING A BWANA During the curing season the farmers slept very intermittently, but the price obtained for Virginia made up for it. It was very much higher than for Burley. Our local cooperative supervisor wanted the African growers to switch to Virginia. The PC, which stands for provincial commissioner, one Commander Tommy Fox-Pitt, supported him. He was indeed a descendant of two British prime ministers. He was a rare ‘character’ in the colonial service who did things that were simply not done. He infuriated white settlers by inviting them to garden parties to which – as they discovered when they arrived – he had also invited blacks. The Virginia growers petitioned the governor. They argued that Africans did not have the sense of responsibility to make a proper job of curing such tobacco. If inadequately cured Eastern Province Virginia reached the auction floors, it would ruin the price for all growers in the province. In response, our local cooperative supervisor outlined a plan whereby all the curing for African growers would be centralized under his supervision. He guaranteed it would be done conscientiously. Fox-Pitt backed him and in a memo to the governor explained the real reason for white opposition: it had been blurted out during a settlers’ meeting that he had himself chaired: they feared that if Africans could earn good money producing Virginia, the farmers’ supply of cheap labour would dry up. After much to-and-fro correspondence (all of it copied to co-ops where I filed it) HE backed the whites. It was, I thought, a strange interpretation of the policy of the ‘paramountcy of native interests’. Commander Fox-Pitt, bypassing all official procedures, wrote direct to the colonial secretary in London. It was another one of those things ‘not done’. Only someone with his name and background would have done it. But for all that, Fox-Pitt was pushed into taking early retirement. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Two of our African inspectors became my friends – Godwin Mutale and Edwin Kapotwe. Kapotwe was the most senior of our inspectors. He was several years older than the others, which meant that when he went through school the very best that Northern Rhodesian education could provide was Form I. He made up for his lack of schooling by intelligence and conscientiousness. After independence his career blossomed; he became the Zambian trade commissioner in a West African country. Later he was transferred to London, to his ministry’s most important post abroad. In London we met from time to time. 173

RHODESIA Eventually, he was offered the job of permanent secretary in the Ministry of Trade back in Zambia. He refused. I asked him why. Two reasons, he said. He had several children at school in Britain where they were getting a far better education than they would get in Zambia. If he went back to Zambia he would have to leave them behind at boarding schools. This would cost far more than he could afford. About his second reason he was more reticent. Eventually, he told me that the ministry stank of corruption. European and American companies requiring import licences always proffered bribes. Ministers and senior officials grew fat on the proceeds. ‘I want nothing to do with all this. I want to be able to face my maker with a clean conscience.’ But he found that he could no longer stay on as trade commissioner in London. The job had been offered to someone else. Nobody had anticipated that he would refuse promotion. Kapotwe applied to retire early and then persuaded the ministry to re-engage him, in a junior capacity, at the London office. This gave him a pension plus a modest salary, which was enough – but only just – to see his children through their education. The corrupt in third world countries often get into the newspapers. Men like him do not. Mutale was among the first intake of co-op trainees who had a school certificate. Tuition in one single secondary school had, at long last, reached that level, 60 years after Northern Rhodesia had become part of the British Empire. Mutale was slight of build, quick in his movements and equally quick on the uptake. At the end of his course he developed some health problem and Captain Berrington agreed to deploy him in the Lusaka area, where he would get better medical attention than in the ‘bush’. Mutale decided to do an economics degree by correspondence. I had done some economics at university and offered to help. After hours, we often sat together in my office and worked at his textbooks. When I left to become a broadcaster my working hours made it impossible to continue and I saw less of him. Eventually I left the territory and we lost contact, but six years later, when I came back to Lusaka for a visit, he was one of the first people I called on. Northern Rhodesia was about to become Zambia and Mutale was about to become permanent secretary in the Ministry of Finance. I congratulated him. He shrugged his shoulders. For 12 years, he said, he had toured from one co-op to another on a bicycle. ‘Yes, it was you who bought me that bicycle.’ He had checked the accounts, traced missing amounts of eight shillings and six pence 174

BECOMING A BWANA here, two pounds there. Not one of the co-ops he supervised had an annual turnover of more than £3000. Then, all of a sudden he had been picked out and sent to Britain for a six-month crash course to prepare him for this new job where he would have to handle millions. It was crazy. If he had been white, he would have been progressing steadily up the administrative ladder these six or seven years, gaining experience, meeting experts, attending Cambridge courses while on overseas leave. Could a brief crash course make up for those lost years? ‘But you know what will happen,’ he said. ‘If I make a botch of it, they’ll say it shows Africans are incompetent.’ Mutale did not make a botch of the job. We met again more than 20 years later when I revisited Zambia. He had resigned from the ministry years earlier. Why? He wanted to be his own boss, he said. And be rid of all those scoundrel politicians. He was now a businessman with a wide range of interests. He invited me to lunch at a grand hotel. When I got there I found, waiting for me, several former co-op inspectors I remembered, plus several others whom I did not. The latter had joined only a few weeks before I had left the department, but they said they remembered me well: I had handed them the first money they had ever earned! Several were now directors of Zambian branches of multinational companies. Others were running their own businesses. We talked. Our old department had never achieved what it set out to do, but some good had come out of it. Trained as accountants they had succeeded in business careers. Never an ill wind … ‘Sure you won’t have a Courvoisier, Peter?’

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Out of the saucepan I had long been hoping find a job at the Lusaka broadcasting station. At last its budget provided funds for one extra programme assistant, but it was not I who was selected. A young man who had been a BBC announcer pipped me to it. I was disappointed. But to my amazement, out of the blue, the job was offered to me a few weeks later. My predecessor had gone. As I was to discover, he been told curtly to resign now or be fired. Such ultimatums are rare in a civil service, but the reason for this man’s dismissal must have been without precedent, certainly in Northern Rhodesia. He had been rude to African colleagues. In those days it was far more usual for the African to be labelled a ‘cheeky kaffir’ and fired, whatever the facts of the case. The little three-roomed building that housed the Central African Broadcasting Service (CABS) was hot and overcrowded, but it pulsated with life. We talked. We argued – black and white. A British writer described his astonishment. ‘The sanity inside the building! White and black were actually behaving like human beings. It was hard to believe that there was a colour bar just outside.’ Ideas were floated, debated, tried out. African staff was encouraged to participate, but not only they. There was a steady stream of casual visitors – African listeners who demanded to see ‘their’ station. They, too, would find themselves drawn into discussions and asked for ideas. From time to time even illiterate labourers who were scything grass outside were surprised to be invited in, asked to listen to a recording and to give their comments. This was the first radio station to broadcast almost exclusively to Africans – to people with a very different culture – and in African languages. There were no precedents to follow. We experimented with new techniques and approaches, discarded failures rapidly and built on successes. The station had been the brainchild of Harry Franklin, the director of information. He was one of those colonial civil servants who took the duty of advancing the African masses seriously. During the Second World War he had started broadcasting war news in four or five vernacular languages. After the war Franklin obtained funds for a 176

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN fully-fledged radio station. Under an agreement with the two neighbouring territories, transmissions for the region’s European population were to come from Salisbury (now Harare). The CABS took on the seven most important African languages of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland (now called Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). This area is five times the size of the United Kingdom. Franklin wrote in an early report: ‘Formal educational methods, taking perhaps two or three generations to produce a comparatively civilized African people … were too slow. … If broadcasting could reach the masses, it could play a great part in enlightenment.’ Today his words sound embarrassingly paternalistic. Indeed, Harry Franklin was a paternalist, but in the 1940s this is what the best colonial officials were. The vast majority of Africans were illiterate and even those with some education agreed that they needed and wanted ‘enlightenment’ and expected their white rulers to provide it. Community receivers proved a failure. Franklin spent months searching for a radio (we called it a wireless set) that Africans could afford: a short wave set working off dry cell batteries, sturdy but above all cheap. Such a set did not exist and manufacturers thought it uneconomic to produce one. The majority of Northern Rhodesian Africans were subsistence cultivators and earned little or no money. Even those within the cash economy rarely earned as much as £3 a month. In the end, Franklin managed to persuade a British firm of battery manufacturers, Eveready, to have a try. They had never thought of going into manufacturing receivers, but he convinced them that this might open up a new market for batteries. They produced a number of prototypes. The most suitable was mounted in a circular metal pressing scrounged from a nearby saucepan factory. It came to be called the ‘Saucepan Special’ radio. Some samples were sent to Northern Rhodesia and were snapped up within days even though the price – £5 for the set and £1.10s for the battery – was at that time the equivalent of two months’ wages for an African clerk or teacher. Eveready went into mass production. Thousands were sold in a short period, not only in Northern Rhodesia but also in many parts of what is now called the third world. Listeners’ letters started to pour in at the little broadcasting house at Lusaka, some in English, others in the numerous vernaculars of British central Africa. Often they were written with obvious difficulty: ‘I have never had anything that could please my life better than the wireless I have got.’

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5. The ‘Saucepan Special’ people’s radio.

‘Through your help we learn many things.’ ‘Broadcasting is to Africans as the invention of printing was to European countries in the Renaissance. … We are no longer isolated.’ ‘When I switch on my Saucepan Special I have all the world in my house.’ The Saucepan radio would not have taken off if the programmes broadcast had not appealed to the audience. And here again Harry 178

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN Franklin did brilliantly. His second broadcasting officer (the first was fired for alcoholism) was Michael Kittermaster. He brought to the job a touch of genius. I joined his team some years later. I was in my twenties. He was in his thirties. No doubt there was a young man’s hero worship in my admiration for him. But looking back half a century later I still insist that he did bring to that job a touch of genius. He had an uncle who had been the governor of Nyasaland. I once came across a photograph of the uncle: erect, in white gala uniform with gold braid, plumed hat and ceremonial sword. His nephew’s every gesture appeared intended to distance himself from that stance. He was informal and untidy. He had an unruly mop of hair and walked with a careless gait. He never dictated a letter but did all his own typing. When our yard was full of litter he took a broom and swept it. White bwanas were not expected to do such things. But he achieved more than cleaning the yard that day: none of us ever dropped litter there again. (I was reminded of Comrade Trumpeldor who picked up cigarette butts in a Ukrainian kibbutz with similar results.) It was Kittermaster who engendered the lively discussions and the experimental atmosphere in the little station and it was largely due to him that it became a phenomenal success – at least for a number of years. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young …’ I have described the workings of the station in a book long out of print. Here I shall recapitulate some of it. The purpose of the station was to provide a bridge between the new and the old to help listeners make an informed adjustment to the new society. We tried to give listeners some insight into the world beyond the confines of their village or mine compound. News bulletins played a part in this. Several differently focused bulletins were put out each day: district, central African and world news. Listeners understood district news easily enough. Central African news was more demanding. There were unfamiliar concepts of finance and politics, but we learnt to explain as we went along. However, world news in vernacular languages presented problems that, in the early 1950s, we found insurmountable. If a listener had no English, that is no schooling or only one or two years in a vernacular language, he or she had no frame of reference into which to fit world news. I recall an item about an earthquake in Italy. ‘I know about Italians,’ said one listener, ‘they live behind Nairobi.’ He had some memory of the Second Word War Ethiopian campaign in which Northern Rhodesian troops had fought Italians. Yet another demanded to know why I wanted to spend my leave in England. ‘But it’s all 179

RHODESIA desert!’ Whatever had given him that idea? ‘Well, if their country were fertile, would they have come to take ours?’ Once a listener in a remote Barotse village asked: ‘This war against the Germans, we haven’t heard about it of late. Who is winning?’ This was eight years after the fall of Berlin. After many such conversations we decided, reluctantly, to confine world news to English-language transmissions. Even central African news in vernaculars was not without difficulties. News items had to be followed by explanatory talks. Kittermaster set me the task of writing such talks and I struggled to produce several each week. I employed the 850-word Basic English vocabulary for my first draft. Then I did something I never confessed to my colleagues: in my mind I translated my Basic English into Fanagalo (or Kitchenkaffir) – that primitive settlers’ pidgin, which I dared not admit to knowing. If anything stumped me, I simplified my script further. My African colleagues occasionally expressed surprise at how easy it was to translate these scripts. Do you know how light a pound note is? It does not weigh very much, does it? One breath of wind and it flies away. But you know how heavy a sack of maize is? Two men have to lift it to put it on the shoulders of a carrier. But even this strong man can only carry it a short way. Well now, if we were to find a big pile of pound notes, as heavy as two full bags of maize, then we would have about the same amount of money as our government will be spending on schools this year. I blush, today, but at the time it seemed just right. I had in fact been down to Barclays Bank and been given permission by the bank manager to weigh wads of pound notes. Two bemused bank clerks (white of course) stood over me and I heard one of them grumble: ‘All this for a broadcast to bloody kaffirs?’ I pretended not to hear. As I became older and, perhaps, wiser I realized that it was wrong to ignore such remarks: one had to challenge them. But, my God, it was tiresome! One factor that kept us constantly on our toes was the very rapid advance in the education and sophistication of our audience. I noticed it in the reaction to the health education talks of ‘Pop’ Adams. He was the tutor at a school for African dispensary assistants – ‘barefoot doctors’, as the Chinese called them. His early broadcasts were greatly admired but within a few years our listeners’ admiration had evaporated. He often preached about the common housefly. Most Africans in those days regarded flies as a harmless nuisance. Adams challenged 180

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN that belief. He explained that the fly spreads disease by eating human excrement. It may then vomit it out over our food. ‘This disgusting habit! This disgusting habit! Just think of it! Such filth is carried to your food. When you have your meal this evening … can you be quite sure that no flies have been near it?’ Listeners started to complain: ‘he’s talking down to us.’ Nothing stood still. Initially our audience had been among the better off and better educated. We had anticipated that radio listening would help to broaden their education and their understanding of the world. And indeed, this did happen fast. But that was only part of the picture. Incomes rose. Tens of thousands of illiterate or near illiterate people came to buy radios, so that the average standard of sophistication of our audience went down, not up as we had anticipated. On the one hand we had to keep in step with the sophisticated listeners; on the other hand we had to become ever simpler for that new mass audience. This mass audience interested me most because here we were in unexplored fields. I suggested snappy, repetitive slogans along the lines of the commercial adverts on Radio Lorenço Marques. This led to lengthy debates. At that happy time there was no advertising on British radio or TV and all of us were contemptuous of hucksters. I did, however, manage to convince my colleagues that education by slogans would be different. I was, I pleaded, not trying to flog overpriced shampoos. Kittermaster suggested a few subjects to tackle. One was the danger of the common housefly. I assembled a small group of four, two whites and two blacks. Among them was Stephen Mpashi, a novelist in the Bemba language who worked as an editor in the government’s publications bureau. He had compiled a collection of Bemba proverbs and suggested we might be able to hook new teachings onto known traditional wisdom. Among many Zambian tribes, proverbs are taught to children around the village fire. They come at the end of a folktale and sum up its moral. Memory is aided by repetition on subsequent evenings. An elder speaks the first half: ‘a field does not grow by itself.’ The children complete the proverb in chorus: ‘not like teeth in the mouth’ (namely effort is needed). ‘One termite … does not build an ant heap.’ ‘Whosoever has the shits … it’s up to him to open the door’ (to relieve himself in the bush). This, Mpashi suggested, was a pattern we could imitate. Responses were to be spoken by a chorus. One of the proverbs we chose referred to the weight of suffering of a bereaved person at a funeral. Corpses are traditionally tied into small bundles and borne to the grave suspended from a pole: ‘though it’s 181

RHODESIA

6: Michael Kittermaster interviewing a Lozi aristocrat at the ‘Smoke that Thunders’.

small … it’s a heavy load. The fly is small … yet it is dangerous. The fly brings disease … kill that fly. This, Mpashi suggested, was a pattern we could imitate. Responses were to be spoken by a chorus. Another proverb we used meant that big problems may have small beginnings, easily ignored, just as a serious swelling may start from a

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OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN minute scratch: ‘Oh, it’s nothing … may make your leg swell up. A man can kill a fly. A fly can kill a village. … You, man! Kill that fly.’ We broadcast such slogans in the Nyanja and Bemba languages for several weeks and then went out to assess their effectiveness. Our interviewers recited the first line and we were delighted to find that listeners almost always completed the slogan correctly, in both towns and remote villages. But that did not mean that we were achieving our purpose. In towns we found that respondents with some education had a fairly clear understanding of the dangers of the common housefly, but they found the linked proverbs bewildering. Even native Bemba or Nyanja speakers were often ignorant of the ‘wisdom of the ancestors’. Moreover, large numbers of townspeople had only learnt Bemba or Nyanja as their second or third language. They had certainly never learnt the ‘deep vernacular’ of proverbs. They tried to interpret them literally: ‘a fly, though small, can infect your leg through a small cut.’ Among illiterate or near illiterate people the explanations were more involved. More sophisticated? ‘Though it’s small, it’s a heavy load. Though the Europeans are few, they are powerful. They’ll get the better of us over this planned federation. Though they are few, we will never be able to drive them out of our country.’ Another example: ‘though it’s small, it’s a heavy load. One man can spoil the happiness of an entire village; if he’s a witch he will bring fear and hatred and suspicion. ‘Kill that fly?’ That means – well – nowadays Europeans interfere. They won’t let us kill witches, but one should chase such a person out of the community. Though it’s small, it’s a heavy load.’ We abandoned slogans. I learnt to respect the common sense of uneducated, apparently simple people. One week the country was flooded by crudely printed advertising leaflets. They came from India and offered, among other wonderful objects, a magic mirror that would enable the owner to see what his beloved was doing, however far away she was. Even better, they also offered a magic purse: you were advised to put one shilling in, but after that a shilling always remained, however much you took out! The asking price was two shillings and six pence. The secretary for African affairs sent down a copy: ‘shouldn’t you be doing something about this?’ Kittermaster invited in a few illiterate labourers who were cutting grass in the vicinity. A translation of the leaflet was read to them. What was their opinion? Silence. Then I saw a grin creep slowly over one of the faces. ‘Bwana, if this Indian man has a purse like that, why is he asking two shillings and sixpence from me?’

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RHODESIA ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ We had a handful of white collaborators – some teachers and a few missionaries – but the bulk of the white population was hostile to everything we tried to do. I recall with chagrin and embarrassment one of my early recording trips to the Copper Belt, the mining area. I flew to Ndola with an African colleague, Sylvester Masiye. He had recently joined us from the army educational corps. We arrived at dusk. A small airport bus was waiting to take us to our various racially segregated hotels. Apart from us two, three others climbed into the bus: two youngsters and an older man, all of whom were white. One of the youngsters was an athletic-looking man with short, blond hair who spoke with the unmusical accent of Southern Rhodesia. The second was a red-faced pimply youth with an English North Country accent. They chatted about seeking their fortunes on the copper mines – the Englishman as a clerk, the Rhodesian as a fitter and turner. Just before we reached the European quarters of Ndola there was an African ‘location’. Masiye was to stay there at a guesthouse. The driver turned off the tarred main road, a detour of a few hundred yards. The young Rhodesian asked: ‘Is this the way to town?’ ‘Just now, sir,’ the driver replied noncommittally. Some cheering African children ran beside our bus. ‘Kaffir location,’ said the Rhodesian. I could see it coming: we were in for a scene. The bus drew up at the guesthouse. Masiye got out and went to retrieve his bag from the boot. The driver went to help. Only we four whites were left in the bus. ‘What’s this building?’ asked the young Rhodesian. ‘African hotel, newly built,’ said the elderly European. He appeared to have an Italian accent. ‘What!’ The young man was aghast. ‘We go to the compound to drop a kaffir first?’ ‘Hotel à la Bantu,’ sniggered the North Country lad. Masiye came to my window to wish me a good night. I hoped he would not overhear them. ‘Well, I really don’t know what this country is coming to,’ grumbled the Rhodesian, ‘It’s those people in England.’ We drove off. The young Englishman hastened to ingratiate himself. ‘Yeah, they’ve no idea what things are like out here. When I first came out I also thought treat them like human beings. Well, now I know better: baboons, just down from the trees.’ Should I make a scene? Was there any point? 184

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN But then the young Rhodesian rounded on the driver: ‘hey, you! Do you always drop the boys at the compound before the bosses?’ Now there was no escaping. I had to intervene, but the old Italian got in first: ‘it was on the way, wasn’t it?’ Sensing unexpected white opposition, the Rhodesian subsided, grumbling: ‘wouldn’t have happened a few years ago. They’re getting too bloody cheeky.’ I had argued over such matters a hundred times – pointlessly. I shut up and felt like a shit. I meant to raise the matter with Masiye when we met next morning but I did not. I was too ashamed. A decade later Masiye became Zambia’s ambassador to Peking. Later I heard he had been offered the post of foreign minister but had refused. He became a prominent lawyer, having studied jurisprudence while a diplomat abroad. We did, however, meet again as old men, nearly 50 years later. Then I did raise the matter but he had read my apologia in my book, years earlier. He was generously forgiving. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ A terrible thing had happened near Lusaka around that time: A white farmer employed a small African boy, aged eight or nine, as ‘nurse boy’ and playmate for his five-year-old daughter. That was common practice at the time. The boy allegedly ‘molested’ the little girl. Just what this meant among such young children I never found out. The irate father tied the little boy up in a sack and dumped him in a shed on his farm. Then he drove into town – a distance of 15 or 20 miles – and bought a set of castrating instruments. He drove back and emasculated the child. He was arrested and charged. The court sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. The settler community was up in arms! They circulated a petition demanding that he be pardoned. When they came to ask my mother for her signature she yelled at the top of her voice that three years was far too little for such a crime and chased them out of her dress shop. It must have lost her customers but she said she did not care a damn. This was, after all, the woman who had sung ‘Brothers to sun and to freedom’ at socialist rallies in Silesia. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Our experiments in communication did eventually produce successes. We tried a soap opera: a family serial in Bemba, the language most commonly spoken in the industrial towns of the Copper Belt. It was 185

RHODESIA designed to let our audience identify with a hero who suffers the problems common among urban dwellers and tries to solve them in an intelligent, modern way. Kittermaster entrusted me with the project. Though we agreed that no European could write such scripts and make them sound plausible, we did not want to leave the serial entirely to our African producers. They had come to think of radio plays mainly as light comedy. This serial was to be different. We decided on a joint venture: scriptwriting by committee. It was not a recipe for great drama but we did not aspire to that. I assembled a group of five or six each Tuesday morning: Among them I tried to include one of the most and one of the least sophisticated members of our staff. I could, however, never rely on having precisely the same team each week because broadcasters were constantly on the move. I also co-opted two members of the publications bureau. The bureau was another of those rare islands where race relations were relaxed. What this meant is that a black man could tell a white man when he was talking nonsense. The two members I coopted were Stephen Mpashi, the writer who had helped me with the ill-fated slogans, and John Sharman, a white linguist. We decided that our hero was to be independent and individualistic, but not improbably good. He was to have problems, problems such as how to get on with an uneducated wife with very traditional ideas, such as whether to send his daughter to school or back to the ancestral village to protect her from the temptations of the wicked town, or such as what he should do about a thoroughly unsuitable suitor hanging round her – a town spiv. On this outline we started to weave plots. We argued. We interrupted each other. We shouted. We laughed. But in the end we did construct personal histories for each of our fictitious characters. Thus, Shimwansa Kopolo was born and planted in a mine ‘compound’ on the Copper Belt, employed as a foreman on the mine company’s food store and blessed with an argumentative wife, Namwansa and three children – two girls and a boy. Namwansa, we decided, was to be an illiterate woman, but well-versed in traditional proverbs and folklore. But would an illiterate woman have the self-confidence to argue with her husband? ‘Make her a crocodile,’ said Mpashi. I looked blank. He explained: ‘a member of the royal clan of the Bemba. Let her husband come from a lowlier clan, say a river. This allows her to take liberties, more so than usual.’ We made her daughter Mwansa a rebellious child, just out of school and in danger of becoming a good-time girl, a kapenta – one 186

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN of the ‘little lipsticked ones’. The word derives from the English ‘to paint’. Her boyfriend we named Smart Jim. He was to wear a cowboy suit, to have some education, possible acquired at a reformatory, and to have a seductive tongue. We attached an apprentice spiv to him whom we called Bob Superman. Would all this become too ponderously didactic? How to bring in some light relief? Numerous ideas were floated. All seemed heavy and unamusing. Then someone said: ‘why not give them a Ngoni neighbour?’ Brilliant idea! In the nineteenth century the Ngoni, an invading tribe of Zulu origin, had constantly been at war with the Bemba. Pax Britannica had been imposed on these antagonists and they had subsequently developed a ‘joking relationship’. Members of these two tribes could abuse each other jocularly without offence being meant or taken. This had become institutionalized so firmly that urban native courts would dismiss cases of insulting behaviour where these two tribes were involved. So our Shimwansa Kopolo acquired a neighbour called Kangacepe who kept our audience amused with ribald commentaries in broken Bemba on the characters and events of the serial. The Kopolo family had its fair share of troubles. Their son Mateo misused school funds to buy himself a guitar. Their daughter Mwansa refused to marry a villager whom she had never met even though her elderly uncle had come all the way from their ancestral village to make the arrangements. I clearly remember the planning of that episode because it made me so very aware of my own ignorance. I had asked how Mwansa was to refuse. ‘She says: ‘is that your wish? Do my parents wish that I marry this man?’’ ‘And what do they reply?’ ‘Nothing. They know that she refuses.’ ‘But – didn’t we decide she was to be a brazen young thing?’ ‘So she is. That is a very impudent reply.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ This was, I think, the most exhilarating period of my career, a career that has, with only brief interludes, always been exciting and stimulating. I felt we few, we band of brothers in that little studio, were doing work that was genuinely useful and constructive. I had grown up in a world overshadowed by evil and destruction: at the age 187

RHODESIA of six I had seen a man stabbed – perhaps to death – in the grand avenue of an ancient city. I had heard my mother, distraught, tell how that city’s prefect had been spat at and beaten outside the prefecture. Pretty vivacious girls from my class had been stripped, starved, frozen and murdered (though I did not know this until later). But I knew for certain that the world needed improving. And I had found myself in the happy position of being able to contribute something towards this. Nor do I think we were deluding ourselves. Driving around the country, everywhere our listeners came out to greet us, to cheer us and to encourage us to keep up the good work. Our reputation spread abroad. Broadcasters from as far away as Algeria and the Cook Islands came to Lusaka to study what we were doing. I felt I would not want to change my job for any other in the world. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ To come back to our soap opera, the serial assumed a life of its own. Sichanda, the old uncle who had come from his village to arrange Mwansa’s marriage, grew to be a major character, an old man trying to do his traditional duties in a strange world whose ways he could not understand, a pathetic old codger but one with an inexplicable dignity. He sees a bus queue. ‘People! People everywhere, jostling, scrapping.’ His niece explains that in towns one has to queue for everything: the doctor, the boma, to collect wages, to buy firewood. ‘You buy firewood? Why don’t you send the boy out to cut some?’ She tells him about the ‘Counters of Leaves’ – the forest guards. ‘But that can’t be! Do they charge people for air, for life?’ He resents the intrusion of the DDT sprayers sent by the mining company to cover the walls of the house with some evil substance. (And writing nearly 50 years later, I now know that the old man was right and we were wrong!) Sichanda cannot adjust to a life dictated by the shrill sirens of the mines instead of the gentle rising of the sun and it’s setting. ‘And who will bury you if you die in this fearful place?’ He finds Mwansa’s boyfriend Smart Jim and his sidekick Bob Superman totally incomprehensible. ‘Why is it that they do not respect their elders? Why do they pretend to these alien names?’ In the end he blesses the day when he can return to his remote, impoverished village. But before departing, he does the rounds cadging gifts for every one of his rural relatives.

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OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ There were, of course, no professional actors in the country. We used willing amateurs. The man we had cast in the role of Smart Jim was the source of some problems. We had tried to find people as similar to our fictional characters as possible. The actress who played opposite him as Mwansa, the daughter, was of marriageable age – a nice, simple, charming young woman. Not many weeks after our serial had taken off, and listeners’ letters were pouring in, she announced she could not continue. Why ever not? Her betrothed refused to let her continue. The producer went to reason with the young man. No, he explained, it was not all that love talk on the air. He realized that was only playacting. What he objected to was the company we expected her to keep. The producer saw his point. He and I had a rapid consultation. We offered to write the betrothed into the serial in a minor role so that he could keep an eye on her. The fiancé agreed somewhat reluctantly. Eventually, he realized that it brought him not only peace of mind but also a weekly fee. He became an enthusiastic collaborator. Smart Jim fitted his role to perfection. He was a most engaging scoundrel. He called himself John Square. He was usually dressed in a blue boiler suit, a silver-studded belt, a four-gallon hat and, occasionally, a bright red or yellow scarf. He was in his mid-twenties and had a handsome face that looked permanently astonished. Frequently he was disfigured by sticking plaster or even by a patch over one eye. Once his whole head was bandaged, but he turned up punctually for our rehearsal. He had a very distinctive deep voice and, when not acting for us, led a choir that sang cowboy songs about ‘riding on the range, my trusty horse beneath me’. He played the guitar quite well. One day our serial called for a love song. He improvised one on the spot, which was, I thought, far more poetic than any in the Wild West films that John Square admired so much. Eventually the villain in our serial had to come to a sticky end. Smart Jim takes a job as a petrol-pump attendant and proceeds to fill up cars with the meter still registering a previous purchase. (I had learnt about such villainies from Watson, my childhood friend.) Smart Jim is discovered and arrested. John Square refused to act the part. ‘I don’t want to go to gaol. It’s not fair.’ I was naïve: I thought he was worried about being ragged by his listening friends. But no! He was thinking about the loss of his weekly fee. But by then he had become so well known that we agreed to let him make a comeback after escaping from prison a few weeks later. That would make a nice moral 189

RHODESIA problem for our citizen–hero – whether to collaborate with the police to recapture the villain or not. I got fond of our villain and asked about his background. He had not been born in a tribal area but on the ‘line of rail’ – at Ndola. That was still unusual at that time. ‘He has never even known his home,’ they told me. (No fixed abode?) After some years of schooling he had been entrusted with his father’s grocery store but he only succeeded in having his old man declared bankrupt within a few months. After that he had moved to Lusaka and had tried to live dangerously, like his cowboy heroes, until the courts put him under a probation officer as a juvenile in need of care and protection. The probation officer sent him to be trained as a shoemaker. This gave John Square an independence such as few African youths enjoyed at that time. He took full advantage of it – drinking, fighting and making love when he pleased, but reverting to shoe repairing when there was no one to sponge on. While he drew our actors’ fees he worked very little at his trade. Perhaps we were doing a public service. Some time before we discovered him he was said to have sold a sack full of shoes entrusted to him for repair and to have financed a momentous party from the proceeds. When the irate owners came to demand compensation he challenged each one to a fight. Perhaps that explained the mass of sticking plaster! Even when he was written – temporarily – out of our script he kept in touch. One day he phoned to invite me to a performance that his concert party was giving. I had to decline, having another appointment. ‘You should have come,’ said Alick Nkhata next morning. ‘It was very unusual. They sang quite well, but when the applause seemed a bit thin, Square stopped the singing, came to the front of the stage and threatened to beat anyone who did not clap hard enough.’ A few weeks later Square rushed into my office: ‘Sah, you must save my life. I shall be beaten to d-d-death. Torn to pieces. T-t-tonight.’ He stammered when excited. I expected to be touched for money. It would not have been the first time. ‘Why?’ I asked coldly. He explained that he had organized a beauty competition and a music competition in the welfare hall. Every competitor had to stake ten shillings, which made up the prize money. He had guaranteed a European judge. ‘They don’t trust us Africans. You must save me.’ I agreed reluctantly but demanded that I be given two African assessors to help with the judging. I did not want to impose my alien tastes, especially where black pulchritude was concerned. Black 190

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN women were, after all, taboo for us Rhodesian whites. He agreed – only too readily. I should have seen it coming: That evening the two assessors outvoted me every time and awarded the music prize to Square’s own group. The beauty prize went to his latest girlfriend. ‘An informed adjustment to modern society’ – could it be that this John Square had achieved it? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ We organized broadcasts on modern farming techniques, on new teaching methods, on forestry, on world history, on forms of government – anything to satisfy the great hunger of our audience for knowledge. We did not have to disguise the didactic nature of our programmes. The audience demanded education. This work brought me into contact with colonial civil servants I admired greatly. But they were rare. One such was Lawrence, the district officer in charge of the Namushakende Development Centre in remote Barotseland. The evening was cool and clear and the tall trees stood out against the sky. We sat outside the tent, Lawrence and I. The last of the servants had departed. The crickets were chirping and the sound of distant drumming floated over from the other side of the Luandui valley. Lawrence topped up my whisky and his. We sat back in our canvas camping chairs. ‘What’s vital is to encourage,’ he said, ‘And to avoid bullying. Most of the time Africans have no sense of participation in what government is doing. But we’ll never make an impact until we can involve them.’ ‘How?’ ‘By encouraging the flow of ideas upwards, from them to us. I try to keep our courses flexible. No two are the same. When we do our recce we ask ‘What do you want to learn?’ Some of their suggestions are a little pointless – or so they seem so to me – but we fall in with them as best we can. Here, in Chief Yusokwakuonga’s area, they said they didn’t need first-aid courses. There was a dispensary seven miles away. OK. On the other hand they asked for knitting lessons. The women love them. I thought baby care might have been more valuable. Infant mortality is very high. But we agreed – up to a point. I briefed the women who teach knitting: wait until one of the babies starts crying. Then ask what it’s being fed on.’ Lawrence was normally taciturn, but that evening he talked until our lamp ran out of paraffin. 191

RHODESIA We’ve invited some neighbourhood chiefs here for a film show next week. We’ll give them hospitality for a night. No doubt they’ll quiz the locals about what we’re up to. Perhaps that will produce requests for visits from our team. Your broadcasts may do the same thing. But we only take the team into an area if it’s been asked for. ‘Have you met with resistance?’ Once. At our first camp we stretched bunting around the site. I thought that would make it look more cheerful. But the locals got very uptight. No other district officer had ever done that. ‘They are pegging land for European settlement!’ Well, you must know that obsession of theirs. I called a meeting and told them that if they did not want our classes, we would go … and take away the offending bunting. They asked us to stay. I said I had been impressed with a liveliness of his team. How had he chosen them? For their ability as showmen, not for any deep knowledge of their subjects. We gave them a few weeks’ training. One long debate, really. At first my presence inhibited the discussion, but after a few days the sparks started to fly – complaints about the Barotse tribal government; complaints about the bloody whites; questions about my own motives. After they’d got all that out of their system we managed to get down to some real work and they produced a number of very good ideas. Take the name of our HQ complex. It’s called after a legendary Barotse princess. She is said to have taught her people settled methods of agriculture. Now we’re teaching them to improve on traditional methods, so I suppose we’re following in her footsteps. Tomorrow you’ll be seeing us demonstrate how to drain flooded valley soils. That’s to increase the area under cultivation. The play that the team will put on is full of lively imagery – and it’s all their own. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The country was so excitingly varied: a few weeks earlier I had found myself in one of the brash noisy towns of the Copper Belt: full of vitality, humour, lust echoed in new music, new dances, raucous banter. 192

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN Now I found myself canoeing over the silent flood plains of the Zambezi. Our paddlers pushed us through tall grass and through delicately coloured water lilies. Our dugout canoe filled with little spiders that had been clinging to the grass. When we came to deeper water our approach disturbed flocks of birds nesting in the tops of half-submerged trees. Once we came upon some snakes hanging in a tree just above the waterline. Before I could protest, one of our canoe men beat them with his paddle. Fortunately, they were somnambulant. We passed deserted villages on mounds. They had been evacuated as the waters had risen. I was travelling light and wore only a short-sleeved bush shirt and shorts. Six hours in the broiling sun and I ended up with fearful sunburn. My companion, Edward Lubinda (later, much later, Zambian high commissioner to Britain) briefed me about the elaborate system of constitutional checks and balances of his people, the Barotse. I knew about the balance of powers between the paramount chief and the Ngambela or prime minister (always a commoner) and the councillors at the tribal capital, Lealui. What was new to me was that parallel to the entire Lealui court there was a second court at Nalolo. Here a princess reigned, the Mulena Mukwae, a niece or aunt of the paramount chief, though often at loggerheads with him. She was the viceroy for the south. Her consort, the Ishe Kwandu, had a fairly humble position at her court. But it was because of this man that I was willing to brave sunstroke, mosquitoes and perhaps even snakes. I had been told he was blind and very frail. This might be the last chance to record him on tape. He was the historian of the Barotse nation. Lawrence had advised me to ask for accommodation at the Paris Evangelical Mission station a mile or so from Nalolo. Our canoe left the shallow flood plain and crossed the deep, fast-flowing main course of the Zambezi. We found that the missionaries had gone. They had evacuated their mound a few days earlier as the river rose. Water already surrounded some of the low-lying mission houses. There was only an old African caretaker in residence. He lived in a hut on stilts at the highest point, the only inhabitant who remained throughout the year. He was most hospitable and promised to arrange one of the higher-lying houses for us as best he could. But there were no sheets or blankets left behind, he said, or any mosquito nets. He hoped we had brought ours. But we had brought nothing but pyjamas and toothbrushes and, of course, our recording machines. We had not wanted to overload our frail dugout. We sent a messenger across the waters to Nalolo. He returned a 193

RHODESIA short while later to invite us over. We canoed across in the late afternoon sun and an excited crowd met us. We made our way to the residence of the princess and were ushered through a series of concentric palisaded courtyards until we came to a large thatched structure with wide double doors. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of early English baronial halls. A blind old man stood in this innermost courtyard, tapping his way towards us with a stick. This was the Ishe Kwandu. He had a warm, handsome face and expressed delight that we had come. Most white visitors, he suggested, found enough of colourful Africa at the rival establishment at Lealui. They, at Nalolo, felt forgotten. He launched into a list of complaints I was to promise to take back to HE the governor. I tried to explain the limits of my influence without, too disastrously, undermining my status. I explained the purpose of our visit. He led the way into a large audience chamber cum living room. On a large, faded European style settee sat the Mulena Mukwae. Her legs were bandaged, propped up on an easy chair. She apologized for not coming to meet us but her legs were swollen and she was in pain. The Ishe Kwandu said that, provided the princess approved, he would be happy to record for us ancient history that had been passed down through the generations, as well as some episodes he had witnessed himself. But there was a problem with the primitive equipment we had in those days: he could not see the microphone and kept directing his voice ‘off mike’. That meant he would not he heard well. Lubinda, the future high commissioner, had an answer: he asked the two or three councillors present to keep absolutely quiet and placed the microphone between the Ishe Kwandu and himself. Then, at suitable points, he punctuated the old man’s speech by clapping his hands – the traditional sign of respect. After that the old man addressed his remarks in the direction of his respectful listener and our microphone. The clapping added to the atmosphere. The old man started by telling us about the complicated negotiations between Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and King Lewanika, which led to the protectorate treaty. He re-enacted the speeches of the anti-treaty indunas, then of the pro-treaty councillors; what the prime minister had asked, what Coillard, the missionary, had advised. His voice changed tone, his gestures changed manner. He seemed to become different people as he re-enacted the suspicion, the cajoling, the resonant oratory and the anger of the participants. Then he turned to a later period: as a young man he had been a 194

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN steward to Lewanika and had accompanied him to England for the coronation of King Edward VII. He had not been blind at that time and he re-enacted the gracious hand wave of the king, the cheering crowds leaning from windows, the clatter of the horses’ hooves. I have since seen great actors in one-man shows switching from characterization to characterization and do not think there was much they could have taught that blind old man. It was getting dark. Someone brought a hissing pressure lamp but I motioned it away. The noise was interfering with our recording. We continued by the light of a few flickering candles. By now I thought I was running a temperature because of my sunburn. The scene began to appear dreamlike. The flickering candles and moving shadows gave only a hint of the expanse of that baronial hall. The resonant voice of the old man seemed to lose itself among the rafters. I knew only a few words of Lozi, yet I seemed to understand everything he said. Once, changing tapes, I took my eyes away from him and was surprised to see that the hall had filled; it was almost full of quiet, barefooted children squatting on the mud floor to listen. A little later others were leaning in through the open windows, their eyes – large, white and set in dark faces – reflecting the candles. A small boy, perhaps a greatgrandson, crept up against the old man’s knee and he patted the child’s shoulder as he spoke. He must have sensed the hundreds of eyes upon him in the dark. His voice rose. He chanted archaic praises for some long-dead prince. It was late at night when we took our leave. The princess lent us a hurricane lamp to light our way. It was a moonless night but the stars were clear. It was only a mile to the mission but we lost our way and floated over the waters. I did not mind. The cool air was pleasant on my burning skin. The paddlers, too, remained cheerful. They could not stop praising the liberal hospitality that had been offered to them in one of the outer courtyards. I was just starting to worry whether we would ever get to bed that night when a paddler spotted a lamp the old caretaker had lit in the mission house. We found our way to the island. There was a galvanized iron tub and some hot water waiting for me. I washed and ate some of the eggs the caretaker had presented to us. Lubinda had had the foresight to bring a tin of bully beef. Then we lay down on beds without sheets or blankets. The whine of mosquitoes in the room and the croaking of bullfrogs outside did not make it easy to sleep. Early next morning a messenger arrived from the princess. The Mulena Mukwae hoped we had slept well. She wished us a safe return. 195

RHODESIA She advised us to be careful of hippos at the edge of the river. What old-worldly graces these people had! The caretaker brought tea and a present of a chicken. He explained that the river was choppy and it would not be safe to cross in our dugout. He would take us across in his large barge. Once across the Zambezi, on the floodplain, we would be safe. So we crossed the windswept river in his barge, the paddlers bringing up our dugout downwind from the barge, but keeping close. Safe, on the other side I turned to the old man and was about to give him the usual shilling or two but something made me hold back: ‘I thank you for your good advice and for your many gifts, also for seeing us safely across the river. I am afraid I have not brought any suitable present to give you. Would you let me give you a small gift of money?’ I’m glad I asked. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘when the missionaries are away I am in charge here. This is my place. You have been my guests. It is right to honour a guest. You would insult me if you gave me anything in return.’ I bowed. Elsewhere, in the turbulent towns on the ‘line of rail’, hands were stretched out clamouring for pay for every little service. But in this backwater … ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ We at CABS had found, just as Lawrence had, that our audience needed to get their frustrations off their chest, to voice criticism and to ask awkward questions. We broadcast questions and answer programmes. The questions sent to our panel (two whites and two blacks) give some insight into the groping of the newly literate for a Weltanschauung to replace that destroyed by the coming of the Europeans: ‘If the missionaries had not come to teach us how to worship God, would none of the people of Africa have been able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?’ ‘Are chiefs necessary for African advancement now? Would we not advance more quickly if educated people took their place?’ ‘If God can do anything, why does He not broadcast so that we can hear His voice and know how He wants us to live?’ ‘Why are Africans not allowed to buy whisky and brandy? If they are bad, are they not equally bad for Europeans?’ ‘Why is an African who takes a European woman punished, yet there are Europeans who take African women?’ ‘Why do European shop assistants call an African “boy” even when he is a grown-up and well-educated man?’ Such questions were answered as best we could (and sometimes that was not very good) in English as well as in various African 196

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN languages. In English we also ran panel discussions, which I frequently chaired. A panel, sometimes all black and at other times mixed, discussed current issues. Should the drift of men to the towns be regulated? If so, how? Should African customary law be changed to allow wills to be made? (This raised an important matter: under the traditional law of certain tribes inheritance went to nephews and nieces. That meant that sons and daughters and even wives were often stripped of property, even the blankets off their beds, when the heirs arrived from remote villages to claim their inheritance.) Were the urban native courts (which administered a mixture of tribal laws) suited to conditions in the towns? What could be done to stem the growth of juvenile delinquency or the growth of urban prostitution? Such English discussions sometimes drew upon us the wrath of white settlers and of their press. One Irish farmer standing for election to the Legislative Council made it a plank of his platform to ‘bring the Lusaka broadcasting station under control’. We were, he said, giving Africans a ‘totally inflated sense of their own importance’. What was the offence he complained of? We referred to panel speakers as ‘Mr So-and-So’. He was one of those who thought all male Africans should be addressed as ‘Boy!’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ In fact, throughout the period I am recalling, race relations deteriorated. The prospect of a federation with settler-dominated Southern Rhodesia did much to poison the atmosphere. In addition, as Africans became better educated, they came increasingly to challenge the helot status to which they had been relegated. For example, Harry Nkumbula, a well-to-do trader and president of the African National Congress, arrived at the serving hatch at Glasser’s stores in Lusaka proffering a wad of £5 notes. He asked for a refrigerator. The nonplussed shop assistant asked him to come into the shop by the ‘white’ entrance. Nkumbula refused. Africans, he insisted, were served through hatches. He was an African. Would they please squeeze the fridge through? Of course they could not do that and – among roars of laughter from supporters who had gathered to watch the fun – he took back his money, saying he would have to take his business elsewhere. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ A major part of the output of our station was music, but this was not 197

RHODESIA simply sugaring our didactic pill. Song, in African society, teaches correct behaviour and chastises the wrong. Commercial recordings were, at that time, in musical styles alien to central Africa, so we recorded our own, locally. We spent much of the dry season touring in remote areas recording indigenous music. One or other of us was out with the recording van much of the year. High quality batteryoperated tape recorders were not yet available and we had to ‘cut’ acetate discs. The equipment was heavy. A trailer with a generator had to be towed behind a Land Rover. During the rains, when rural roads became impassable, the recording van was employed in towns along the line of rail. The songs that were brought back from urban areas often reflected the problems of the new townsmen, displaced from their quiet hamlets to vast concrete-block ‘locations’. I sat for long hours with African colleagues, working on the translations of such songs. I was fascinated. They reflected the disorientation, puzzlement and loneliness of new town dwellers: Oh, the restless wanderer! He has forgotten his tribe and his kin. He picks up any woman of the city. He sucks the sweets of Ndola town. Forgotten the taste of wild fruit. Other songs conveyed comic advice: Marry in the cold season, said one. That way you’ll see whether the girl is clean! (Meaning: is she willing to wash in cold water? African locations had no easy means of heating water.) Another sang of the miseries of a village girl who was insufficiently sophisticated for her better-educated husband: He said he did not want me any more. I’d shamed him in the presence of people. I asked you to make tea but you cooked the leaves like vegetables and poured on groundnut gravy. I did not know village women were so ignorant. Songs frequently reinforced traditional morals – denouncing selfishness or pride or financial greed. I recall one that complained of the haughtiness of the men sent by tribal chiefs to serve as judges on 198

OUT OF THE SAUCEPAN urban native courts. They gave themselves airs as if they were chiefs. When they cycled along footpaths they rang their bells, ordering people out of their way. Nor were whites spared. One of the last surviving blind minstrels, a ragged old man I recorded, put their iniquities very movingly: I do not know the way to God, Else I would have gone to complain. Oh, Jesus, what clothes shall I wear on this earth? White men have no sympathy. I do not know the way to God, Else I would have gone to complain: Their voices are harsh and their eyes are not kind. White men have no sympathy. I should have asked for eyes, but I do not know the way to God. Oh, Jesus, what clothes shall I wear on this earth? White men have no sympathy.

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Chapter 11

Vultures high and low I came out of the studio, having just broadcast yet another explanation of yet another white paper on the proposed federation of the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland. This one had been drawn up by a group of officials from the three territories under the chairmanship of one from Britain. They had come to the conclusion that the similarity in the native policies and practices of the three territories was far more striking than the differences. Cyrus Ntini, one of the gentlest, least aggressive of our staff – a Southern Rhodesian – confronted me: ‘Do you really believe that?’ ‘I’m reporting what’s in the white paper,’ I replied and then added, somewhat lamely. ‘It’s been drawn up by high-powered lawyers.’ A second broadcaster joined in: ‘They’ve been bribed.’ This I did not believe. But privately I, too, wondered whether the men who had drawn up this document were knaves or fools. I preferred to believe the latter. But for some time now I had kept such doubts to myself. I made something of a fetish of my civil servant’s detachment. Michael Kittermaster had detailed me to explain these endless constitutional discussions to our audience. I did so, trying not to show where my own sympathies lay. I refused to admit to myself that there might be moral laws with greater weight than ‘General Orders and Colonial Regulations’. But all the while anger and hatred rose around us like the tides of the sea. ‘Look,’ Ntini continued, ‘Here in the north if I go to see a district commissioner and he sees that I am decently dressed and that I speak English, he offers me a chair and he says: ‘How can I help you, Mr Ntini?’ But in my home district in Southern Rhodesia the native commissioner – that’s what they call them down there – makes me squat on the floor and call him mambo as if he were a tribal chief back in grandfather’s days. And you know those mambos haven’t even got university degrees, unlike your northern DCs here. Never mind what it says in that white paper.’ His colleague rummaged among his papers and handed me a press cutting: ‘Why didn’t you put that in your news bulletin?’ 200

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW It was a report on an assault case against a European, Andrew James Botha, in Umtali (now Mutare) in Southern Rhodesia. A number of African witnesses described how they went to attend a meeting convened to explain the federal proposals in the local cinema. The prime minister, Sir Godfrey Huggins (later Lord Malvern) was to address it. It was probably the very first time Africans had been admitted to a ‘European’ cinema in Umtali, a town on the border of Mozambique. They arrived early and found seats in the front of the hall. A little later the hall filled up and there were shouts from the audience that there were not enough seats for Europeans; the Africans should sit on the floor. Botha then went up to an African teacher, got hold of the lapel of his jacket and dragged him out of his seat. The chairman intervened and asked the Africans to sit on the floor, which several proceeded to do. Botha, however, attacked one who was slow to move and gave him a hard blow in the stomach. Then he moved up and down the cinema shouting: ‘why are kaffirs sitting while Europeans are standing?’ There were cries of ‘throw out the kaffirs’ and when the prime minister came on stage the noise increased. Several Europeans proceeded to pull Africans from their seats, grabbing them by the scruff of their necks and pushing them down the aisle. For ‘rank hooliganism’ Botha was fined £10. ‘There you are,’ said our announcer, ‘that’s your “partnership of the races”.’ And indeed white politicians, with an eye to British and world opinion, talked endlessly about this partnership. But at meetings with their own white constituents they emphasized that, of course, there always had to be senior partners and junior partners. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ At the time Southern Rhodesian settler politicians were constantly telling us that our blacks are very happy. Colonial Office rule in the north just makes the native discontent – strikes, riots, tub-thumping. What the native wants is a strong guiding hand. Certainly southern Africans did, at that time, seem far more docile. And who could foresee the future? I once discussed this docility with one of our broadcasters from the south. His reply? ‘Their sufferings are too deep for words.’ Some weeks later I was on duty with another of our southerners. He was playing a strangely haunting recording, a vast swelling melody like the sea that rose above a slow, heavy stamping rhythm. I spoke to him through the intercom. ‘It’s very beautiful. What does it mean?’ He came out of the studio. ‘It’s about Lobengula, our last king, and about 201

RHODESIA the great herds of cattle we used to have, cattle that we loved more than our lives.’ What he did not explain – I only read about it years later – is that white pioneers had robbed them of those herds – war booty! He translated. ‘Where are our fathers? Where are our cattle? You, oh great lover of cattle, where are they now? That world has been overthrown.’ We talked about Lobengula’s last campaign and his mysterious death. Had it been suicide? (At the time the story still appeared obscure. Now it is accepted that he took poison to avoid capture.) I suggested we might do a programme about his end. There were bound to be people still alive who had been with him on that final retreat. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘my grandfather was among them. He’s about 80 now.’ I suggested he should take a recording machine with him when he next went on leave. He shook his head. ‘When I was a little boy I used to ask him about it; he would start to tell me and get all excited. But then he would stop and start to weep. He just cried and cried and refused to say another word.’ I recounted this in my book Wayaleshi in 1958. One perceptive reviewer picked it out, dismissing the politicians’ guff about the new dawn of federation. ‘If what is coming there can be called a dawn, it looks as if it will be a bloody one.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Nearly 20 years later three planes, British made, swooped down on a convoy of trucks travelling along a remote rural road near Mkushi in the independent state of Zambia, their rocket guns blazing. When the smoke cleared there were many dead and wounded. All but two were Southern Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) guerrillas in training. The Zimbabweans had been on their way back to their base camp after a day of battle manoeuvres. Two peaceable civilians were found among the dead, their bodies severely burnt. Their Land Rover had been trapped between the Zimbabwean trucks. One was Zambia’s most talented musician, my friend and former colleague Alick Nkhata. The other was one of his friends. In faraway London a friend in the BBC Africa Service phoned to give me the news. I searched out some of Nkhata’s recordings and sat down to listen, with a bottle of whisky. What a talent wasted! What a sense of humour extinguished; charm, stage presence – all gone. I got very maudlin that night, mourning also another brilliant musician I had known, my Breslau classmate Walter Ahrends, murdered by the Nazis. That same week, according to the Zambian press, there were 202

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW several other Rhodesian attacks on Zimbabwean establishments inside Zambia. At a refugee girls’ school at Chikumbi they landed troops from helicopters. Their leader instructed the head girl to blow her whistle and assemble the girls. When they trooped into the assembly ground the Rhodesians opened fire. Perhaps they were the sisters or daughters of guerrilla fighters. I do not know. The Zambian press would have been discreet about revealing such a connection. But they were schoolgirls. It was a bloody dawn. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ But to revert to Africa in the 1950s: out of endless conferences and documents emerged, eventually, a draft constitution. I was given an advance copy so that I could prepare my broadcasts. But more, I was given access to confidential government files by way of background briefing. What I read all those years ago remains implanted in my memory. I read that Mwanawina III, paramount chief of the Lozi – one of the two or three most important chiefs in the territory – had been very anxious to be invited to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. His grandfather had attended the coronation of Edward VII and tales about that journey were still being recited around village fires in the 1950s. For the sake of his own memory Mwanawina III felt he had to be there. The resident commissioner, having consulted Lusaka, told him he might indeed be invited provided he threw his weight behind the federal proposals. Mwanawina (according to the file) was reluctant, knowing that if he caved in the intelligentsia of his own people would denounce him as a sellout and an Uncle Tom. Eventually, he compromised and agreed not to denounce the constitutional proposals publicly once they were published. Moreover, he agreed to warn against the use of violence. He was, so far as I know, the only major chief in the territory who compromised to that extent. He was also the only one invited to the coronation. Some years later he was knighted. Such files should not be allowed to fall into the hands of idealistic young men. I read on: district commissioners had received an advance summary of the penultimate draft of the constitution. They were asked to report on likely African reaction. I remember particularly well the replies that came from the industrial towns of the Copper Belt – potentially the most explosive area. I suppose one could say they lacked enthusiasm for the proposals but, with one sole exception, all said that if they recommended them, Africans would accept them. 203

RHODESIA Perhaps a few Congress agitators might try to stir up trouble, but they had little real support. One district commissioner, and only one, reported that Africans would regard the proposals as a grave breach of trust and there would be trouble, lots of it. And, indeed, so it turned out. But what I found particularly puzzling was that this dissenting voice was not that of a man with many years of experience of Northern Rhodesia but of one who had arrived only a short while earlier from the Sudan. In the Sudan, I believe, there was no rigid colour bar to block communication between rulers and ruled. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The constitution was duly published. Settler leaders demanded that the colonial administration should ‘give a lead’ to Africans. It was clear what they meant: ‘impose it and tell them firmly it’s for their own good. No ifs and buts.’ But there appeared to be some reluctance in official circles to behave in so autocratic a manner, at least in these early stages. I was detailed to explain the constitutional proposal in simple language. I did half expect to be instructed to ‘plug it’. This would have faced me with a dilemma: to obey or resign. I loved the job and would have found it difficult to resign. But to obey? Fortunately, I received no such instructions. All I was told was that the administrative secretary would need to approve my scripts before they were broadcast. He was the director of information’s boss, who was the broadcasting officer’s boss, who was my boss. Never before, so far as I knew, had any broadcast required the approval of ‘God’ himself. I worked long on those scripts. In my final version they were packed with ifs and buts: if, at any time in future, an attempt were to be made to pass such and such legislation, the following checks and balances would come into operation. Britain retained a right of veto over such and such laws. Certain matters, particularly African land rights, were inviolate. However, other important questions like the federal franchise had not yet been decided. Decisions had been left for the first federal parliament. I anticipated being reprimanded for ‘giving them ideas’, dangerous ideas. After all, the two African members of the Legislative Council (both barely literate) had never made an issue of this, namely that the franchise would be left to a parliament that was certain to be settler dominated. I fully expected my script to be vetoed but it came back with only one word scribbled at the bottom: ‘approved’. 204

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW Was the administrative secretary on the side of the angels? He went further and gave instructions that my explanation of the federation proposals should be reprinted in Mutende, the government’s own paper in African languages. Mutende was very far from being a shining example of British ideals of press freedom. It suppressed all news of the African opposition to the federal proposals and never mentioned the African National Congress, except when the government issued a statement condemning its actions. In fact, the paper had a rare distinction, perhaps a unique one: in 1936 it had reported the abdication of the King Emperor Edward VIII without ever revealing that there was a woman involved! Pas avant les enfants! But my script was published in full in Mutende in four languages. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ What were Africans thinking? Politicians, journalists, broadcasters flocked to Northern Rhodesia to find out. All of a sudden our quiet backwater appeared to acquire some importance. Among the visitors was Clem Attlee, then leader of the British opposition. The Labour Party had not yet decided its attitude towards federation. In its original form, Labour had appeared to back it, but that was before their defeat in the 1951 elections. Parties in opposition do not always retain the policies they follow while in government. Besides, there had been some changes in the proposals subsequently. A number of us followed Mr and Mrs Attlee on a visit to a ‘typical African village’. In my car I had a visiting British reporter. ‘I suppose it will be a model village with hand-picked government stooges,’ he said as I negotiated our way around potholes. I was irritated. ‘You’re not in the Soviet Union.’ But as we drove on I started to worry. What if he were right? Honesty was wearing thin: pressure on us broadcasters to suppress uncomfortable news was increasing. I felt some relief when we reached Mungule’s village. It was the usual squalid cluster of decaying huts with hungry mongrel dogs sniffing around. Our party was directed to a hillock where a row of chairs had been placed, as if on a platform facing an audience, except that there was no audience. There was great shouting and whistling and not long after Chief Mungule hastened along and was introduced. We all sat down but it was discovered that Attlee would have to talk across several people to communicate with the chief. The district commissioner suggested a rearrangement of seats. We all sat down again. Then the chief’s interpreter arrived breathlessly. Chairs 205

RHODESIA were rearranged once more. The DC asked where the villagers were. They were waiting in the shade of a big tree at the other end of the village. Chief Mungule dispatched his messenger to call them. There was a pause. ‘It is a bumpy road,’ said Mr Attlee. The chief agreed. The government should build a better one, he said. Would the Big Bwana be so good as to tell the Bwana Governor? Another awkward pause. Attlee shifted his hat from knee to knee. The DC saw that he would have to get the conversation going. ‘Chief Mungule!’ he said, ‘Bwana Attlee – of whose fame you have heard – has travelled across the sea from England to see for himself how the subjects of the Queen are being cared for by her present advisers. He wishes to know how the crops and cattle of the Lenje people are, and how the rains have been this last season.’ A few minutes of pleasantries ensued and then Attlee took the initiative. ‘And do your people discuss the question of federation, Chief Mungule?’ ‘Yes, sir, they do.’ ‘And what do they know about federation?’ ‘They do not know about it.’ ‘But they talk about it?’ ‘They talk very much.’ Mrs Attlee laughed and her husband cast her a reproving glance. ‘How can they talk about it if they do not know anything about it?’ ‘They are waiting for the big bwana to explain it to them.’ Another awkward pause, with Attlee shifting his hat from knee to knee. ‘May I take it from you, sir?’ said the DC and placed the hat on an empty chair. Then he felt it necessary to intervene again: ‘Chief Mungule, Bwana Attlee has not come to explain but to hear what the chief and the Lenje people have to say.’ ‘Sir,’ said the chief, ‘I and my people are against this thing. We do not want to hear about it. We have been happy and we do not want any change.’ ‘I see,’ said Attlee, ‘but what are your reasons?’ ‘We will lose our land if this thing comes about. We are against it.’ At this point the villagers arrived, twenty or thirty toothless old men in discoloured greatcoats and torn trousers and behind them a few younger men. They squatted down in front of our hillock and clapped their hands in greeting. The chief raised his voice to make sure his people heard and repeated: ‘we will lose our land if this federation comes about.’ 206

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW ‘But,’ said Attlee, ‘the constitutional proposals entrench African land rights.’ ‘Maybe, maybe, but we do not want this federation. We are afraid.’ ‘Afraid of what?’ ‘We are afraid of losing our land.’ The old men clapped their assent. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The following day Attlee met trade union bosses and African National Congress leaders. Here he was in his element and it was the Africans who were floundering. The trade union leaders were particularly confused in their presentation: on the one hand they demanded universal suffrage. On the other they begged the Colonial Office to continue to rule over them until Africans were better educated and ready for more political responsibility. They told Attlee that colonial governors were always chosen from the most reactionary elements of the British Conservative Party, apparently unaware that many of the governors had been appointed during Attlee’s own term as prime minister. He told them firmly he was ‘not very impressed’ with them. When they said such things it cast doubt on all the other things they said. The African case was pathetically badly presented. But that did not mean that they had no case. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The speech made in the Legislative Council (LegCo) by Dauti Yamba, the senior of the two African members, was particularly embarrassing. He had come into prominence in the 1940s because he had taken a courageous stand against white domination. He was then a junior schoolteacher. His own level of education was the equivalent of that of a 12-year-old in Europe, but in the 1940s there were no bettereducated leaders available. Change had, however, been rapid. Ten years later there were many more younger, abler and better-educated men available who might have replaced him. To the new intelligentsia he had become an embarrassment, but he was shrewd enough to get himself re-elected by pompous phrase mongering, which impressed the illiterates. In this crucial debate on the draft constitution his speech rambled over a wide range of irrelevant issues and only briefly touched on the document under discussion; and then he displayed the most astounding ignorance. Edwin Kapotwe, my old friend and 207

RHODESIA colleague from the co-ops, was sitting next to me in the LegCo public gallery. He let out a low groan and covered his face with both hands. The ‘officials’ – the colonial civil servants who sat on LegCo – had made it clear that the draft constitution confined itself to listing those subjects that would become the responsibility of the federal government. This, they explained, was a constitutional device normally used to prevent future disputes over who had responsibility for what. Any matter not specifically listed as ‘federal’ thus remained ‘territorial’. Various newspapers had explained the same point and so, of course, had my own broadcasts, which had been reprinted in Mutende in four languages. Yamba: ‘Now, when I read the report, Sir, the page they call the list of subjects in here, and I think I might have been very careless in reading it, I did not see a single list of territorial functions. I did not see them. Which are they? They are left in the air.’ Then he proceeded to obscure the issue further by listing secondary education as an example of a subject that would affect Africans, apparently unaware that secondary education was certain to remain a territorial concern. Yamba: ‘There is nothing that will not affect us, unless, of course, we are told to go somewhere else when the federation comes. I would like to make it to be clearer that as long as we are human beings in this country, federation will never fail to have some effect on our lives in this country and we very much regret that if it might happen.’ And that was all that Dauti Yamba, member of LegCo, had to say about the failings of the constitution that was to bring many years of trouble to British central Africa. After that his speech rambled on irrelevantly and eventually petered out. There is a saying that the time calls the man: that leaders emerge in response to challenges. In 1953 the seven million Africans of the three territories of British central Africa produced no such leader. Eventually one did emerge, though not in the Rhodesias but in Nyasaland: Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He did more than anyone else to stir up the resistance that eventually brought down this ill-conceived federation.

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VULTURES HIGH AND LOW ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Our broadcasting station had tried to confine itself to explaining the federal proposals and offering to answer listeners’ questions. We had several regular programmes in which questions sent in by listeners were answered. We were normally overwhelmed by listeners’ letters, but on this question of federation there were a mere one or two, yet this was the issue that was agitating Africans most. Were they losing faith in us? I suppose this should not have surprised us. Listeners could not help noticing that the faraway BBC (whose news bulletin we relayed once or twice a day) reported the pronouncements of the African National Congress while we mentioned them very rarely. They must have realized that pressure on us was becoming fiercer. I recall no formal instructions to suppress this or that item, but once or twice, after a broadcast, critical comments were relayed down, which made us more cautious. On the other hand, attacks in the settler press were becoming frequent. They said that African opposition to federation would never have arisen if only we – the colonial civil service and the government radio station – had handled the matter ‘more firmly’. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Some time after this I first met Harry Nkumbula, the head of the African National Congress, then the main African opposition movement. This happened at the bar of the new Kabulonga Club, the only interracial club in the territory. My former boss, Harry Franklin, who had by then retired, had been the chief mover. Many people paid lip service to his idea: yes, in these tense times bridges between the communities had to be built. A dozen top civil servants turned up for the opening ceremony and dutifully enrolled. Thereafter, we never saw them again. They continued to patronize the all-white Gymkhana Club. Among Europeans who did prop up the bar regularly were two policemen in civvies. We suspected they were there to sniff out subversion. They kept to themselves and mixed very little. One evening I made the effort to get talking to them. I was astonished by their naïvety: they could not have distinguished a mild Whig from a Moscow-trained agitator. A week or two later a friend told me he had found one of them in the toilet, making notes after a bar conversation. The two of us confronted Harry Franklin: either they go or we do. From that day on they were never seen again but a sophisticated senior policeman joined the club. We made no objection to him. 209

RHODESIA On the whole, the atmosphere in the club was relaxed. Harry Nkumbula occasionally chaffed me about the misdeeds of our broadcasting station. One such occasion made a lasting impression on me. I see what’s been happening. I see it only too clearly. The statement we issued after our last party conference, not one single word of it appeared in your news bulletins. But then, the following week, I made a speech at Kitwe and you covered that fully. Why? I’ll tell you: [it is] because a few days earlier the State Department in Washington issued a statement that could, I suppose, be seen as a mild, a very mild and timid criticism of British colonial policies. Pressure from Wall Street, probably. The moneybags want to safeguard American investment in Africa. So London took fright. I suppose they told the governor to watch his step and so you fellows got new orders ... which is why my Kitwe speech got proper coverage. Well, I suppose one should be grateful for small mercies. I hope I managed to keep a straight face: Nkumbula’s scenario was logical, almost convincing, but reality was quite otherwise. On the day of the Congress meeting Kittermaster was away from Lusaka – he may have been on overseas leave. I did much of the political reporting, but I too was away recording some educational programmes. I should have been back at Lusaka on the final day of the Congress, but I sprained my ankle and was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room at Mufulira. The European colleague who compiled the news bulletin that day was of a timid temperament. Had Kittermaster been on the spot, any ‘sensitive’ story would have been referred to him. In his absence I would have been consulted. Either of us would have given the go-ahead and been prepared to take any future flak. Since neither of us was present, our colleague simply suppressed the item. The moment I hobbled back an African colleague pulled me aside and told me what had happened. I was furious and said so to the timid compiler. A few days later, Nkumbula made his speech in which he recapitulated points from the Congress resolutions. This time I made sure that I edited the news bulletin myself and tried to make up for my colleague’s failure. Wall Street had no part in it! I have often had occasion to remember this. In later years I was responsible for BBC transmissions to Greece at the time of the colonels’ dictatorship. It happened more than once that Greek opposition politicians in exile would buttonhole me and outline 210

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW elaborate conspiracy theories. The CIA, the British royal family, the Ankara government and God knows who else were brought in to explain events that seemed to require no such explanation. I would admire the ingenuity of their constructs, but say to myself that perhaps someone had sprained an ankle! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Among the visitors to the Kabulonga Club was one who drank no alcohol: Kenneth Kaunda, the future president of Zambia. At that time he was one of Harry Nkumbula’s lieutenants. Later he broke away from Congress and launched a more radical movement. My colleague, the musician Alick Nkhata, had been his classmate at Lubwa mission school. Alick had told me that Kaunda had been an intensely religious youth. Once, asked to read the lesson, he had been so moved by the passage allotted to him that he had broken down and been unable to continue. To get into conversation with this taciturn young man I said: ‘Kaunda? That’s not a Bemba name, is it?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘my father came from Nyasaland with the early missionaries. He was an evangelist at Lubwa. I was born there.’ Forty or more years later his political opponents tried to make out that his long presidency of Zambia had been illegal: he had never been naturalized as a Zambian citizen, but that was mere political shenanigans – Zambian citizenship did not exist until Kaunda created and named the state. But this happened long after our conversation at the Kabulonga Club. Kaunda continued: I think the white missionaries found me a difficult youngster. Each Sunday they sat in the front row of our church in padded armchairs. The black congregation – and that included my father – had to sit behind them on wooden benches. And yet he’d been a preacher longer than most of those whites. I got up in class one day and asked whether it would be the same in their heaven – blacks on wooden benches at the back? Everyone laughed, or almost everyone. Not Kaunda. I hope that I didn’t. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The atmosphere was getting tenser. European cars were stoned. We 211

RHODESIA locked the back door of our control room. Until then it had always been kept open and visitors had often squatted on the steps and listened. That way we had got instant audience reaction. No more. The government published a new bill making it a criminal offence to issue statements ‘dangerous to peace and good order’ at any meeting of more than three people. Then Harry Nkumbula announced that he would burn the white paper outlining the draft constitution at a public meeting at Lusaka. A visiting BBC reporter said he would like to attend. I offered to take him. The reporter was Martin Esslin, later head of BBC radio drama and author of many books on theatre. There were hostile murmurs as we pushed our way through the crowd. I wondered if we had been wise to come. The crowd seemed angry. A riot could be in the making. The speakers were late. Africans usually were. We waited. I tried to listen. Most of the crowd were speaking Bemba. At last there was some applause. Nkumbula had arrived, accompanied by several other leaders. They sat down at a table in a clearing amid the crowd. There was no platform, so only people in the front rows could see the speakers. More waiting. Someone pushed through carrying an extra chair, which he placed in the front row. More waiting. Suddenly Nkumbula stood up, raised his hand and called out in a ringing voice Bayete – the royal salute of the Zulus. Some in the crowd responded half-heartedly Bayete. Then I noticed two uniformed chiefs’ messengers clearing a path for a man whom I recognized as Mpezeni, paramount chief of the Ngoni, an offshoot of the Zulu nation who had battled their way north in the nineteenth century. Astonishing! This Bemba-speaking crowd was hailing the chief of their traditional enemies. The meeting began with prayers. Then Nkumbula, wearing a London School of Economics blazer, proceeded to read a speech. ‘After due deliberation regarding the proposals contained in the White Paper on Closer Association, we have decided that they are totally unacceptable to the African people and that we must voice our bitter opposition.’ I had expected a spellbinder, a fiery demagogue, but Nkumbula spoke with the detachment and mannerisms of a touring district commissioner. Moreover, he spoke in English and at the end of each sentence three interpreters interrupted his flow. The Bemba interpreter’s rendering was more fiery and drew some applause. This was Kenneth Kaunda, the future president. But even he was hampered by the text he had to translate: For these reasons it has been decided by the Supreme Council 212

VULTURES HIGH AND LOW of the African National Congress to call upon our people to observe two days of prayer. During these days no work shall be performed. Christian leaders are asked to conduct prayers for their Christian followers. Non-Christian elements are also asked to pray to God in their traditional way. … I appeal to all antifederation elements to observe these days with solemnity and with great reverence. At long last we came to the burning of the white paper. I had expected a flaming bonfire, rather like the fires Goebbels had lit in Berlin to burn books the Nazis hated. Not so. Nkumbula brought out a few copies of the government document and impaled them on a skewer. There was further delay as an aide brought some lighter fuel and poured it over the papers. Then Nkumbula set them alight and dropped the skewer to earth. However badly staged, the flames roused the crowd. There was a roar. Fists were raised. Women ululated shrilly. Someone near me shouted ‘kill them!’ I did not think this referred to us but Esslin and I withdrew slowly towards the edge of the crowd. In the centre some men were doing a war dance around a tight-lipped photo reporter from the settler press – the only other white man present. Nkumbula stepped between him and the dancers and waved them away. There was more shouting. There was no violence. It was so unlike Breslau in 1933: storm troopers beating their opponent with clenched fists, a standard-bearer plunging a brasstipped flag into the man’s chest and my father repeating uncomprehendingly: ‘the police just stood by. They just stood by. After all, this isn’t the wilds of Africa.’ Someone started to sing and within seconds the crowd took up the harmonies. Anger seemed to subside. It was a song full of allegory. It referred to the coat of arms of Northern Rhodesia: an eagle holding a fish in its talons. The bird symbolized the colonialists; the fish was the land, the beloved land. The poet and composer (as I discovered later) was none other than Kenneth Kaunda, the future president. Vultures are flying high and low. Brothers, watch the vultures! What will they pick up next? What will they pick up next? A fish, or something bigger? Brothers, allow them no more! 213

RHODESIA Allow them no more! They are cunning and armed with sharp beaks to frighten the living and to feast on the dead. Brothers, where are you? Are you watching? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ What followed greatly influenced the rest of my life. The two days of prayer were approaching. The African National Congress spoke of ‘mass action’ and of a ‘national stoppage’. Government became jittery. A senior official addressed a meeting of African civil servants. He was shouted down. Such impertinence had never been seen before – not in Northern Rhodesia. A few days before the day, Edwin Kapotwe phoned and asked to see me. We had been close to each other in my years at the co-ops. I had seen less of him since then but continued to think of him with great fondness. He had a temperament quite free of the dark fears and suspicions harboured by many other Africans I knew. ‘He is one of the loyal ones,’ Captain Berrington had said, ‘one of the few.’ That was a misjudgement, but one typical of whites. As a child Kapotwe had come under the influence of a truly Christian couple – white teachers at his mission school. There was, he told me, something saintly about them. Knowing that such people existed, even among whites, made it easier for him to put up with less saintly ones. He came to the point with un-African abruptness. ‘What shall I do about this strike?’ I had been afraid he would want to talk about that. I stalled. ‘Sit down. Let’s talk about it.’ ‘What would you do if you were an African?’ ‘First tell me how you feel about it.’ He was normally gentle and soft-spoken. Not that day: I want to stand with my people, but I have a wife and children and two nephews to look after and I have almost 20 years of government service. The chief secretary says they’ll dismiss any civil servant who comes out on strike. I’m not a member of Congress. I’ve never had much time for them. But in this case they’re right. They’re right.

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VULTURES HIGH AND LOW He was shouting and I gestured to him to lower his voice. I did not think he would wish to be overheard next door. He continued more quietly: ‘every single African I know is with them on this, even the chiefs.’ Indeed, I had recognized several chiefs apart from Mpezeni of the Ngoni at the white paper burning. In earlier years most chiefs had disassociated themselves from the new class of educated townsmen who seemed set to supplant their influence. ‘It’s easy for Nkumbula to call a strike of bricklayers or miners. They’re on daily pay, but I’m a civil servant. A civil servant has duties and responsibilities. Besides, I have 20 years of pension rights to lose.’ ‘It’s very difficult,’ I said. ‘But there comes a time when every African has to get up and speak the truth.’ ‘Maybe,’ I ventured, ‘that doesn’t only apply to Africans.’ He looked at me for a moment, puzzled. ‘What are others doing?’ I asked. ‘Lots of them talk big, but they’ll be scared when the day comes.’ ‘What proportion will come out?’ ‘I don’t know. Do you think they’ll really dismiss us if we do?’ ‘That depends on how many come out. If all African civil servants were to come out, or a large majority, government could not dismiss them; but if there are only a few, they’ll certainly make an example of them.’ ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘and it will be the wrong ones: not the ones who hate Europeans most but the most upright ones.’ ‘And what will Congress do if you do go to work?’ ‘They’ll call us traitors and police spies. Some of their toughs threaten to beat up anyone who goes to work, but that’s just talk. It’s not them I’m afraid of.’ He was quite exhausted and sat in front of me expectantly. I sat looking at him. In this divided society this was, perhaps, the first time an African had crossed that invisible barrier and appealed to me as one human being to another – as one man in trouble to a fellow man. And I? I did not know what to say. ‘I don’t know, Edwin. I don’t know. What I do know is that I am a bachelor and have only a few years’ service, but – I don’t have the courage of my convictions.’ I was on the verge of tears. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Was my position tenable? Would I be able to stay on at my post as pressures increased? If I resigned, what would I do? There was no 215

RHODESIA other job anywhere in the territory that appeared to me as interesting as the one I had. Go overseas? I would have to uproot myself a second time. I had come as a poor refugee boy. I had succeeded in establishing myself in a new world. To start all over again in lands where no one knew me and I knew no one? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Farce can be the twin to tragedy: I had friends among the social anthropologists at the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute. Among them was Merran, my future wife. She told me she had been invited to dinner at the home of the secretary for African affairs – the top man in the provincial administration. The invitation happened to coincide with the first ‘day of prayer’. When the guests arrived, the lady of the house apologized profusely: it was going to be a rather improvised meal. Her cook had not turned up. He was such a faithful servant, she was certain he had made every effort to get through the picket lines. He knew she was expecting guests. There was so much intimidation. Wasn’t it terrible? Back at the Institute, Merran mentioned this to one of the African research workers. He doubled up with laughter: ‘that man – the cook – is one of the organizers of the pickets!’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The two ‘days of prayer’ were a failure. Response to the strike call was only sporadic. Congress did not have the organization to bring it off. The largest trade union – that of the African mine workers – complained they had never even been contacted and asked for their support. In the House of Commons in London – half-empty as it always was for colonial debates – the Conservative colonial secretary Oliver Lyttelton, spoke: ‘The use of phrases like “African opinion is solidly against the scheme” are far too definite and dogmatic to be accepted and find no general acceptance from those who are in close touch with African opinion.’ On the other side of the house, a Labour MP, Stanley Evans, concurred. He said that in his travels he had found that 95 per cent of the African population of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland lacked political consciousness. They knew nothing and cared less about federation. They were to be proved wrong, both of them – very wrong.

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Chapter 12

Vampire men And then the inarticulate stirred. Sugar sales on the Copper Belt dropped suddenly. A day or two later the sale of tinned bully beef came inexplicably to a halt. Shopkeepers were puzzled. But it took some days before news of all this reached us at Lusaka. I learnt about it startlingly, late one afternoon: I was compiling the evening news bulletin. In the government press office next door I heard a duplicating machine pounding. There was nothing unusual in this. When LegCo was in session they often issued transcripts of the day’s speeches quite late. I went next door to pick up my copy. Perhaps it might provide a last item for my bulletin. I found the orderly who normally worked the duplicator cranking the handle. With him was a man I could not place though I thought I had seen him before. Later I learnt he was a darkroom assistant from the photo section. ‘More press communiqués?’ I asked. The two appeared to freeze. I seized a sheet from the duplicating machine. It was headed ‘PRIVATE CIRCULAR TO AFRICANS ONLY’ – clearly not an information department circular. I read on. The House of Laws (sic) in London had decided to put poisoned sugar on sale to Africans, commencing on 8 February. This would cause African babies to be born dead and men to become impotent. All were warned to beware of such sugar. The two made a half-hearted attempt to block my way out, but I pushed past them and hastened over to the studio to deliver my bulletin. Moreover, I wanted to ask my African colleagues what they knew about this strange business. Yes, said one of them, he had heard rumours that very morning that Roy Welensky, the settlers’ leader, had ordered a massacre of Africans by poisoning sugar. But no, he had not seen any such leaflet. I had a sudden glimmer of comprehension. I had heard Welensky addressing LegCo on the draft constitution. I had thought at the time that his speech had been grossly inept. But could it have led to this? The new information department boss had already gone home. I followed him there. He was entertaining friends for sundowners and 217

RHODESIA offered me a drink. I signalled that I needed to see him privately. Before I had even finished my tale he exploded. ‘A special branch man came to see me this very morning. They’re ransacking the country to find out where these leaflets are coming from.’ ‘They can stop looking,’ I grinned mischievously, ‘they come from your office!’ ‘They told me at least four different typewriters were being used,’ he said, ‘they’ve been working at it all night. But it all started on the Copper Belt.’ In the court case that followed I was a crown witness. The two accused had the look of hunted animals. They had no lawyer to defend them and the chase seemed, somehow, unsporting. Nkumbula might have briefed a lawyer, but he clearly did not want Congress to be identified with such primitive behaviour. The public prosecutor – a sharp young barrister – was a keen huntsman: ‘Where did you get this from? … Who asked you to duplicate it? When did you first see it? Where?’ The accused spun fantastic tales: they had picked up the leaflet in the street. They had thought the director of information ought to be informed of such matters so they were making copies to present to him. ‘How many copies did you want to give the director?’ ‘Two or three.’ ‘Mr Fraenkel said you made about fifty. Why?’ ‘No, we didn’t. He is lying. He has always hated us.’ ‘We have heard the witness Anthony say that he discovered some 200 copies, partly burnt, in the incinerator.’ They did not know the English word ‘incinerator’ and an interpreter had to be called. They prevaricated. ‘The first copies weren’t neat.’ ‘Does it take 200 copies to get two or three neat ones?’ ‘My friend had never seen a duplicating machine working. I wanted to show him.’ Their defence was pathetic. They had little understanding of European court procedures. The magistrate was a good man and stopped repeatedly to explain proceedings in simple language, but his words appeared to mean little to them. When I had finished my evidence he explained that they now had the right to ask me questions. The darkroom assistant asked why I hated him. He had never done me any harm. Why had I denounced him? The prosecutor closed in: ‘did you believe what these leaflets said?’ ‘No, sir, I did not,’ said the darkroom assistant. I was fairly certain 218

VAMPIRE MEN that was not true, but perhaps he believed that such a reply might lighten his sentence. That was not how the prosecutor saw it. ‘So you made these pamphlets knowing they contained a lie, which would cause great fear and alarm among ignorant people? ‘Yes, sir.’ He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, the orderly to two. I thought the sentences were justified but I was not happy with my own role in this business. But what else could I have done? It left me wondering, as after my conversation with Edwin Kapotwe, can I stick it out? What more is going to happen to make my position untenable? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I looked up Hansard to remind myself what precisely it was that Welensky had said in his speech that might have triggered off these myths. Towards the end of a long speech extolling the economic advantages of federation, he had addressed himself to the African masses: If they do not come with us, and I do not mean it as a threat, if they do not come with us, they will meet with the same fate that came to the Indians in the USA. They disappeared. We have got to become part of the industrial civilization that the Western world insists upon. If we do not do that, we will disappear. He ought to have known better. Few peoples have adapted more rapidly to the demands of a changing world and with so much zest and lust for life than central Africans. If in Northern Rhodesia (as distinct from the neighbouring Belgian Congo) they were not yet fully integrated into industry this certainly was not due to their own reluctance. It was because white trade unions, including the Railway Workers’ Union, which Welensky himself led, fiercely upheld an industrial colour bar. But to the illiterate masses Welensky’s words clearly meant ‘he wants to wipe us out just as the whites massacred the Red Indians.’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ From sugar the rumours turned to tinned meat and eventually to blood. A few weeks earlier tinned meat had come on the market labelled ‘FOR AFRICAN CONSUMPTION’. What that was meant to say was that it was poor quality, unsuitable for consumption by the master race. The rumour spread that this was human meat, poisoned to break 219

RHODESIA African opposition to federation. A Copper Belt district commissioner held a public demonstration. He and his senior African clerk opened some of these tins and braved the inferior cuts the Rhodesians had reserved for blacks. The spectators saw but were unconvinced: the DC obviously had strong magic. The fear was unabated. Men turned to look behind them as they walked. They avoided paths through the long grass. Who knows what might lurk there? The following week I drove home one evening just as it was getting dark. The streets were strangely deserted but this did not strike me, not until later. When I reached home my mother asked me to speak to Senti, our cook. She could not make out what was troubling him. He should have gone off duty earlier, but I found him squatting on the concrete floor of our kitchen. He appeared grey with fear. He clutched my hand and begged me to drive him home. ‘Sure I’ll drive you home Senti. But, what are you worried about?’ ‘They’re all over.’ ‘Who, Senti? ‘ ‘Banyama!’ So that was it! I should have been able to predict, but I had not. Several times before I had come across these strange atavistic myths about banyama, vampire men. They caught children and gave them an injection that made them lose the power of speech. Then they became the docile creatures of their captors. Their captors led them away to some faraway place, sucked their blood and feasted on their flesh. There were other variants of the myth: adults, too, might be caught, a rubber ball would be forced into their mouth so they could not yell and they were dragged off to slave labour in the Belgian Congo. Anyone, even one’s own best friend, might be a munyama (the singular) because a munyama was not necessarily a free agent. He might have been captured and then turned loose to seize further victims. Just what had given rise to such superstitions in Africa’s past – human sacrifice or the slave trade? I never did discover. But I did know that these fears always arose in times of crisis and insecurity.* Now a new variant of the myth had appeared: The victims lost their willpower and were made to support federation. I took Senti home that evening. I tried to reason with him as we drove but that did nothing to calm his fears. We drove along unmade * For a psychoanalytic interpretation see ‘Response to social crisis: aspects of oral aggression in central Africa’, in A. L. Epstein, Scenes from African urban life, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.

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VAMPIRE MEN tracks between the rows of small, identical concrete huts. He begged me to drive right up to his door. From the car he called to his wife. She opened the door a few inches. He dashed in and I could hear the door being bolted. I drove back through the ill-lit and silent ‘compound’: a thousand miserable little houses, all identical. I lost my way. I stopped to ask, calling outside several houses where a candle was still showing through the window. There was never a response. Behind bolted doors people were cowering. It took me a long time to find my way back home. Anything unusual was linked to the vampire danger. In neighbourng Nyasaland rumours said that the banyama used a Land Rover with a shiny metal back, which, given a fevered imagination, might be thought to look like an enlarged bully beef tin. The Central African Film Unit happened to use just such a vehicle. When they turned up to film at a school not far from Zomba the children fled screaming and one little boy fainted, collapsing at the feet of the startled cameramen. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Such primitive blacks! Rhodesian whites told each other that it would take Africans 1000 years to reach our European level of civilization. But I had different standards of comparison. I remembered Breslau: my walks with my father when he would insist on stopping at Stürmer display cases to read that salacious Nazi rag. Sometimes I, too, could not resist reading how slimy, cunning Jews with hooked noses abducted beautiful, blond, innocent Christian children and slit their throats slowly, ever so slowly, in the disgusting manner of their kosher butchery to obtain blood. Jews lusted after Christian blood to make their Passover matzo, the unleavened bread that they use to celebrate their exodus from Egypt and the drowning of the Pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea. Such myths had once been widespread in Europe. The twelfth-century mass suicide of the Jews in York, Engand, had been the aftermath of a pogrom triggered by just such a rumour. That had, of course, been in the ‘dark’ ages. But in the well-lit 1930s, in a country with one of the highest standards of education in the world, the Stürmer published such reports as fact. A thousand years? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ The vampire-men myths found a new focus: the Central African Broadcasting Service. Us! 221

RHODESIA Our announcers broadcast distasteful news – ‘bad’ news. How could they read items on constitutional conferences without denouncing them as part of an evil plot, unless they too had become banyama? There were other suspicious circumstances. We sent our late-shift announcers home by car. No other government department did this, but then, none of them worked so late. Our green van moved about the silent compounds after the noise of radios had ceased. Was this the truck that vampire men used to spirit away their human cargo? One of our best-loved broadcasters, Edward Kateka, was a large Falstaffian character. His nickname, Mfumfumfu, suggested that words poured from him like waters down a waterfall. How could so popular a man read these news bulletins – unless? The rumours distressed him less than other colleagues. He had been with the army through the Burma campaign as a sergeant major. He was not easily frightened. When he heard some people whispering as he passed them in the street he turned, confronting them and demanded that they repeat to his face what they had whispered behind his back. He continued to go out after dark and defiantly even went to a sparsely attended dance. Again he heard people whispering that a man such as he should not be allowed to live. As he was about to leave he called into the hall: ‘I’m going home now, along the main road to Chilenje. I shall be alone. Those of you who want to kill me come and get me!’ Such a man must have very strong magic. He was probably the most dangerous of the vampire men. No one followed him that night but a few mornings later an angry crowd of people awakened him. They were all around his house and they threatened to burn it down and kill him and his family. He opened the door and faced them. They shouted that a child was missing in the neighbourhood and it was he who had abducted it. ‘If I’ve done such a thing,’ he shouted above the uproar, ‘I should be reported to the police and put on trial and sent to prison.’ ‘Yes,’ they shouted, ‘Yes.’ ‘Then let us go to the police station together and you can lay a charge.’ The mob agreed and, with Kateka at their head, still in his dressing gown, they marched off to the nearest police station. Once there, Kateka asked for police protection. He coped with this hostility. His wife could not. While he was at work she took refuge in our offices. She sat in a corner, suckling her baby, miserable and terrified. Others of our broadcasters received threatening letters. Their friends avoided them. Our recording vans had their tyres slashed in remote villages. Musicians 222

VAMPIRE MEN refused to record for us or offered only songs denouncing federation. One of our best members of staff was close to a nervous breakdown. But all this went unheeded by politicians in London. Perhaps it was not surprising that they could not comprehend political opinions expressed in such unfamiliar ways: in the nightmare of vampires that strike men dumb and suck their blood, in the dread of sexual impotence induced by sweet sugar, in the poetic symbolism of Kenneth Kaunda’s song about a fish carried high in the air in the grasp of a bird of prey. Despite all the efforts of our broadcasting station few Northern Rhodesian Africans knew very much about constitutions, franchises or separate voters’ rolls. But they sensed that political power was being handed to people who were hostile to them and to their aspirations. And they were right. One does not need to know how to decipher constitutional jargon to have gut feelings that are sound. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ In June 1953 the House of Commons passed the bill bringing the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland into being. There were 188 votes for, 164 against. I now know that after this outrage I should have resigned. Michael Kittermaster did, not long after. But I hung on. No doubt my refugee insecurity contributed to my indecision. Perhaps things would settle down? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Our rapport with the African masses appeared destroyed, our listeners alienated. But we struggled on. Kittermaster, not long before his own resignation, produced one of his inspired ideas: ‘these studio discussions are all very well, but it’s only the elite who participate. These new recording machines ... they’re light and portable. We can get out into the streets and villages. We should try and get ordinary people into our discussion programmes.’ He detailed Alick Nkhata, the musician, and me, to get such programmes on the air. I argued that if we were to re-establish our credibility we would have to tackle controversial issues: the colour bar in shops, the treatment of patients in hospitals, police brutality and low wages. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘What about the settler press?’ 223

RHODESIA ‘Go ahead.’ We called the series Imikalile Yesu (the way we live). We set about making plans for a discussion on juvenile delinquency. We would record a well-known thug, a tribal elder, a young prostitute, a social worker, a drunkard and a village elder. Our plan turned out to be totally impractical. People refused to participate. ‘You just want us to support federation. You are all banyama. If we say what we really think you’ll report us to the police.’ For the first of these programmes we had to call on personal friends of Nkhata’s and mine. Senti, my parents’ cook and Watson, the petrol-pump attendant, made their debuts as broadcasters. Many of the opinions we recorded were ill informed and abusive. We made a point of giving them an airing but balanced them with other, better-informed ones. Our second programme dealt with the police. At the time there was great resentment against them. They had dispersed a demonstration by women – some with babies strapped to their backs – using teargas. ‘They’d gas their own mothers, the bastards,’ said one interviewee. We opened the programme with his words. That was sure to make the listeners sit up! Others expressed curious ideas: ‘I hate policemen,’ said one. ‘If I make friends with one and he spots a stolen article in my house, he’ll arrest me ... even if I’m his good friend. Or if he’s too embarrassed, he’ll sneak on me and send another.’ The next participant argued this was not criticism but high praise. A policeman should never favour his friends. In yet another programme we turned to hospitals. Why were so many Africans reluctant to go to government hospitals? There was a long chronicle of grievances. Nurses sell drugs prescribed for patients. Male nurses seduce female patients. The best medicines are kept for whites and so on. We juxtaposed such views against those of others who argued that such villainies were extremely rare and were punished promptly. Hospital supervisors explained how the distribution of drugs was controlled and checked. This broadcast brought upon our heads the long-anticipated attack from the settlers’ press. ‘For the Witch Doctors an Official Boost’ ran the headline in the Central African Post. Contradiction was not enough, argued an editorial. Such opinions should have been deleted. No amount of contradiction could have removed the suspicion and distrust they will have caused. If the editor had been in touch with Africans he would have known that all these were commonplace complaints. I had heard the same sitting outside that petrol station at the age of 12 – and many times 224

VAMPIRE MEN since then. I suspect what really roused the paper to fury was a speaker who said that syphilis had come into central Africa with the Europeans. We had not censored him. In fact, it is uncertain whether Arabs or Europeans were responsible for bringing in this previously unknown bug. What is certain is that the epidemic of VD coincided with European settlement and urbanization. But the newspaper was not weighing up facts. The assertion had touched emotions. ‘It can only substantiate the worst lies spread about Europeans by African nationalist extremists.’ The paper demanded that the producer be fired. I was not. In fact, not long after I was promoted to become the No. 2 of the radio station. My superiors gave me their backing, but what gave me even more pleasure were letters of support from listeners. I quote one: People are airing their views quite freely. In other words they are emptying their minds … making it easy … to refill the minds with good knowledge. The best way I know of changing a man to your way of thinking is to start off by saying ‘yes, yes’ and then adding a little ‘but’ after he has spoken himself out. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Before the imposition of federation the settler press had argued that once it was a fait accompli Africans would accept it. The economic benefits would become obvious and ‘all this fuss will die down.’ But this was not happening. Two, three years passed and now, in a hitherto peaceful country, we were faced with violence – though fortunately it always remained on a small scale. Someone had to be blamed. First in line of fire were the district commissioners who had not ‘given a firm lead’. But we were second in line: our broadcasts were ‘giving the natives ideas’. A series of mine on British constitutional history came in for a round of abuse in the settler press. Of course, British history did set dangerous precedents. It is full of uppity white people who challenged the status quo. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My own position had changed. I was producing fewer radio programmes and rarely got out of my office. The station had grown and I found myself preparing budgets rather than recording music. I worked on programme schedules instead of canoeing over flooded plains. But 225

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7. Escape from the office: recording by the shores of Lake Malawi.

I was not yet 30 and did not look forward to a future tied to an office desk. I struggled to find time at least to chair the occasional discussion programme and it gave me some wry pleasure when a settler I knew stopped me in Cairo Road. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘I heard your programme last night. Amazing! That black, what’s his name? The fellow was talking sense. Who could have believed it? A kaffir!’ He was talking about a man who, eight years later, became a government minister, and a highly regarded one too. But I had no gift of prophesy. African advancement had received a tremendous setback and I doubted that it would recover in my lifetime. I managed one last escape: we had a studio in Nyasaland (Malawi), which had been abandoned some years earlier for lack of funds. Three of us went to reopen it as a recording base: a black colleague, a white engineer and I. We drove a Land Rover recording van over long stretches of beautiful country. We recorded the rhythms of the boatmen as they sang and stamped on the ferry they hauled across the Shiré River, the masked dancers of the Vinyau Society and the chants of the muezzins in Islam’s southern outpost. Near the border with Tanganyika – former German East Africa – we recorded dances that mimicked the German goose step. Oh for a TV camera! 226

VAMPIRE MEN I helped with campaigns to reclaim the eroded slopes of steep mountains. I felt that I was doing something useful again: in one area, agricultural officers were trying – with little success – to persuade villagers to accept the consolidation of land-holdings. Peasants eked out a poor living because they had to work half a dozen pint-sized plots separated by miles of bush track. A few hours’ drive away there was, however, a pilot project where land consolidation had been accomplished. That project had been launched several years earlier – before federation had poisoned the atmosphere. Now the locals found that their workload had diminished but their earnings had increased. The agricultural officers felt the time was ripe to extend the scheme. They offered me some scripts on the success of the pilot scheme. I suggested an alternative approach, based on what I had seen Lawrence do at Namushakende: Ask the headmen of your pilot project to invite the elders of your target area to visit. Can you lay on transport? Then, if that’s not against regulations, get a cow slaughtered. And provide beer. We’ll get the chief of the pilot area to address the visitors. Let him explain what’s been done. I’ll be there and record him. ‘Wonderful idea,’ said the agricultural officer. ‘But.’ ‘But what?’ ‘The chief is an old man. He’s never fully comprehended what we’re doing.’ ‘Let him talk. He’ll be more persuasive than any scripts you or I could ever write.’ It was great to be on the road again. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Back in Northern Rhodesia the easy, peaceful atmosphere of earlier years had vanished. I could see it in the faces of my colleagues – inward turned. Outside, any traffic accident in which a white driver injured an African could spark off a riot. There were two or three whites stoned to death, horrible deaths. Laws were passed to impose collective punishment. Boycotts of stores practising racial discrimination brought about violence: pickets beat up boycott breakers. But one heard reports that storekeepers who paid protection money had their pickets withdrawn. Africans invaded ‘European’ restaurants demanding to be served. White diners assaulted them. Even in churches there were scuffles when Africans marched into ‘white’ churches and demanded the right to worship. The white settlers had triumphed. They had, after all, succeeded in 227

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8. Obscure constitutional shenanigans clarified. Guardian cartoonist Low on a high!

manipulating London and federation had been imposed. If white leaders had been wise they would have trod softly in those early years. That might have given wounds a chance to heal. But they did not. Dauti Yamba, MP, for once spoke sense. He quoted an African proverb: ‘When you have knocked a hole in a man’s head and you meet him just as it has healed, you don’t start by drawing attention to the scar!’ ‘Peace,’ he added, ‘would have been nourishing.’ But the settlers’ representatives exploited their advantage. They introduced legislation to increase the number of MPs, both African and European. These were to be chosen by a non-racial roll – black, white or brown could qualify – provided they had sufficient income. But since most Africans were too poor to qualify, it meant that the extra black MPs were going to be chosen by a predominantly white electorate. This was designed to produce stooges and stooges they were. The 228

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9. Alick Nkhata with his quartet. Rocket guns silenced his song.

constitution had reserved bills of this type for a British veto. I expected Whitehall to exercise it. No veto was used. Looking back decades later we now know that eight years of brutal civil war followed in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) – disembowelled whites, black villagers burnt to death, cattle hamstrung, farms destroyed. Even in neighbouring Zambia innocent bystanders like Alick Nkhata, the musician, died in a hail of bullets. How many would be alive today if Whitehall had acted more wisely? ‘Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?’ ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ One morning, driving to work, I noticed paramilitary police with long batons patrolling downtown Lusaka. No doubt they were expecting another demonstration. When I reached the secretariat I noticed police Land Rovers parked discreetly around the building, their windscreens covered with wire mesh. In the corridors of the building I met the commissioner for labour and mines. He had participated in several of our discussion programmes. ‘Have you got a moment, Peter?’ He took me into his office, called for tea and then shut the door: ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘I want to ask you this.’ There was an awkward pause. 229

RHODESIA ‘You have lived in a police state.’ I nodded. ‘Was it like this? Like Northern Rhodesia today?’ So even people like him were agonizing about the scenes outside. ‘What’s happening here is bloody awful,’ I said, ‘but no. Nazi Germany was worse, much worse. Here they haven’t let loose murderers.’ But after a moment’s hesitation, I added, ‘or only a few’. He did not take me up on that reservation. I was thinking of the story that Phillips, the Jehovah’s Witness, had told me: how he had overheard two white policemen discussing how to cover up a murder. Their black subordinates – stupid buggers – had beaten an accused so severely that he had died. I was thinking of the gaoler who starved his prisoners by salting their food to make it inedible. This man, a former professional boxer, challenged the ‘uppity’ ones to a boxing contest and then knocked them cold with one blow. There were rumours that one of them had died. But the commissioner did not ask. That question the commissioner had posed was close to the questions I was asking myself – far too close for comfort. No. It was not like Nazi Germany, but neither did reality tally with the complacent words of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India: ‘There has never been so great an instrument for the good of humanity as the British Empire.’ British sins were sins of omission or neglect or paucity of imagination, not of evil intent. The Nazis banned secondary education in Poland. They are quoted as saying: ‘all the Poles need to know is how to read road signs so that they don’t get in the way of our vehicles.’ The intention was to reduce Poles to hewers of wood and drawers of water. The British, on the other hand, paid lip service to African education. Some admirable people dedicated their lives to it. But very little government money was channelled into it. It was left mainly to impoverished missionary societies. As a result, it took more than 50 years of British rule before the first African in Northern Rhodesia could qualify to enter a university. Each colony was expected to pay its own way out of its own tax revenues. For most of the British period Northern Rhodesia subsisted on a pathetically small budget. Yet even then there was enough money for grants for white children to be sent to schools abroad and acquire university entrance qualifications. I know: I was one of those children. Since there was no similar provision for Africans, most were left as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Nazis set food rations for millions in their occupied territories at starvation level. The Northern Rhodesian agricultural department strove valiantly, again on a minute budget, to improve nutritional 230

VAMPIRE MEN standards, but the majority of Africans remained badly undernourished. I remember the head of one government department telling me that towards the end of a month he could not get a decent day’s work out of his staff. They were hungry. In Nazi Germany it was official policy to sterilize Germans of part Negro descent to secure the purity of the German race. Such a thing would have been unthinkable in Northern Rhodesia. But, as I mentioned earlier, a white farmer near Lusaka did castrate a small black boy for ‘interfering’ with his daughter. He was, however, gaoled for three years. ‘No, Commissioner, it is not like Nazi Germany.’ But that was not enough for my comfort. I tried to discuss my problem with my father. I still accompanied him occasionally on his after-dinner walks; still carrying that powerful torch they had sold him in Berlin ‘in case of snakes’. I could never make him comprehend fully what was bugging me. To him, Northern Rhodesia bore no resemblance to Nazi Germany. Even the stellar constellations, as he never tired of pointing out, were different. But once or twice my arguments seemed to strike a chord: he talked about colleagues of his in the civil service – Germans who were not Nazis but who had remained at their posts hoping they could mitigate the evils of the regime. ‘They deluded themselves,’ he said. ‘They became accessories to crime.’ And I? ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ Do I contradict myself? Do I appear ambivalent in my attitude to British colonial rule? I was and I continue to be so. I met some splendid dedicated people in the ranks of the colonial service, and some ill-intentioned and incompetent ones, and many in-between. I learnt how difficult it was to find the right people for jobs in the colonies – jobs that gave so much power to quite immature recruits. On my first ‘home leave’ I was having breakfast in a little Bloomsbury hotel frequented mainly by middle-aged ladies up from the provinces. A young Scotsman joined my table. I was probably the only young male in the breakfast room. When he discovered that I came from Africa he was delighted: ‘I’m down here for an interview for the Kenya police – eleven o’clock this morning.’ I expressed some surprise. Kenya was getting very unfavourable publicity in the press at the time because of the Mau Mau rising. 231

RHODESIA ‘Great!’ he countered. ‘I did my army service in Malaya. Now that was some scrap! Best time of my life!’ And he stretched out his arms, index finger extended, to imitate a Tommy gun: ‘Rat-tat-tat!’ He pretended to spray the sedate little hotel’s guests with bullets: ‘Wipe them out, the commie bastards,’ he called – just a little too loudly. Several of the ladies looked up, startled. ‘Yes, I want to get back into the scrap.’ I never found out whether the interviewing board accepted him. However, some years later, when I read of the slaughter of Mau Mau prisoners at Hola Camp, apparently by their warders, I wondered. ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ My two worlds were coming together: not many years earlier I had been an Untermensch, a Yid, despised and humiliated. I had found myself transformed into a bwana – one of a master race. Neither my failings nor my achievements could have justified either. It only showed up the world as mad, mad, mad. And it did force one to think. Should I stay or go? My indecision went on far too long. Had I been bought? My income, perks and all, was far higher than any I was likely to earn in Europe. I paid practically no taxes. I had been offered a free plot and a subsidized mortgage to build myself a house. I even had a plan ready, based on an award-winning Californian villa. I had worked out where I would plant the guava and the mango trees, the hibiscus and the bougainvillea. I was entitled to six months overseas leave every three years and, in addition, a fortnight’s local leave each year. An interest-free loan for a new car was available every three years. There were servants, cheap booze and, to cap it all, a most exhilarating job. Where else could a young man of 30 enjoy such a life at that time? Until a year or two earlier, a family problem had tied me down. For many years I had anticipated that when my parents became too old to work – my father was already in his late sixties – I would have to support them. Other young men could roam the world looking for a place, a job and a woman. Not I. All this changed miraculously from one day to the next when German restitution payments started. My father was awarded a good monthly pension and a tidy sum of back pay thudded into his bank account. Until then my parents had lived very frugally. They had not had a holiday in 15 years. Suddenly they found themselves comfortably situated. My mother used some of the new money to open a ladies’ dress shop. She had learnt the trade by 232

VAMPIRE MEN working as an alteration hand and saleswoman. She made a great success of her business. In her old age she would say that these had been the best years of her life. Really? Not those early years of her marriage when she had been a lady of leisure in Cosel? ‘Certainly not,’ she replied. ‘In Lusaka I could prove myself.’ Should I stay or go? There was another consideration – Merran, a young New Zealander social anthropologist. But she had gone to England, disgusted with the racial situation in Northern Rhodesia. Her distaste for the racial situation resembled my own. At least, that is what I say. She says that in the 1950s I still had attitudes too close for her liking to those of the white settlers among whom I had grown up. We still argue about it – after more than 40 years of marriage. I must admit she was far more courageous in defying the mores of that society than I ever was. At a dinner party a black ‘houseboy’ served a guest from the ‘wrong’ side. Her hostess seized a table napkin and used it to whip the man to the ‘right’ side. Merran got up in the middle of the meal and walked out. When whites spoke contemptuously of blacks, which was often, she developed an effective way of cutting short the boring arguments that would follow if she dissented. ‘Of course,’ she would say, ‘You can’t expect me to see it quite your way – having a Maori grandmother.’ That grandmother was a creative fiction! ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ After months of indecision I decided I simply could not continue propping up this system, not if I wanted to quit myself as a man. I envisaged the situation getting steadily worse. I thought we were sliding into civil war. Fortunately, I was wrong. The future – at least in Northern Rhodesia – never became quite as gloomy as I feared. But I was right to go: the years that followed were full of bitterness. It would have been difficult to do useful work in that pestilential atmosphere. Years later – far too late – the British government recognized its mistakes. Harold Macmillan detected a ‘wind of change’. It had, in fact, been blowing quite fiercely for some years. After ten years of disorder, Whitehall allowed the federation to split up. Nyasaland became independent as Malawi; Northern Rhodesia followed and became Zambia. Southern Rhodesia, deprived of its northern appendage, was renamed Rhodesia. And it was there (‘but our natives are so happy’) that eight years of brutal civil war ensued until eventually, there too, white rule collapsed. 233

RHODESIA ŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠŠ I spent my last year planning this, my second exodus. This time there would be no band playing sad tunes: ‘Must I leave this little town and you, my love remain?’ But before I buried myself as an accounts clerk in Balham or a supply teacher in Croydon I wanted to see more of Africa. I had endured several dull sea voyages between Cape Town and Southampton – 13 days out of sight of land! On an earlier trip I had sat beside the ship’s pool and read books about West Africa. Each evening, on the way down to dinner, I had studied our progress on a map. I saw that the exciting places I was reading about were only just over the horizon. It was very frustrating. I swore this would be my last voyage staring at water and dolphins. Next time I would go overland. I spent months studying maps and timetables and prospectuses. I wrote innumerable letters and got them translated into French and Portuguese. Unfortunately, the cross-Sahara bus service had been stopped because of the Algerian rising. It seemed the French, too, had ruled with little wisdom. Coastal shipping around West Africa proved unpredictable. The shipping companies warned me I might be stuck for weeks at Pointe Noire or Port Harcourt waiting for the next cargo boat. Everything seemed to be against me. But travel across Africa I did.

234

Chapter 13

Searchlights in the dark It was a moonless night. The stars – those upside-down constellations of the southern hemisphere – had a fierce clarity. No light came from either shore to dim them. The jungle around us was black. Dark waters lapped the side of our ship. Suddenly a bright beam pierced the darkness: a powerful searchlight coming from the ship’s bridge just above us. I had seen such searchlights before – many years earlier. But they had searched the sky for enemy planes to come. This light, now, was peaceful, seeking our way forward, skimming the shores of the Kasai River. It scanned the left shore of the great river. We watched, fascinated. Back and forth the beam searched, but for a while it did not find. Then it picked out a luminescent cross on the bank and fastened onto it. The ship shuddered as the helmsman turned towards the marker. Now a second searchlight lit up, sweeping the other, the right bank. Again we watched, as if watching a duel. Our cold beers were forgotten. How long would it take him to find the next? A few moments later the beam picked out a luminescent star. One of the passengers – it must have been that American woman – clapped. There were crosses on the left bank, stars on the right. The helmsman turned towards the new marker. And thus we zigzagged into the night. Once, on that first night on the Kasai, we saw a fire flickering on the shore. Men squatted around it and the flames lit up a village of thatched huts. On subsequent nights we encountered more habitation. One by one we returned to our cabins to sleep, safe under our mosquito nets, in the bosom of Otraco, the Belgian Congo river navigation company. Some time during the night the engines must have stopped, but I only noticed this at dawn, looking out at the mists that had risen from the river. Even the tropical sun took a while to disperse them. The men on the bridge, the one who steered the great wheel and the two who aimed their beams of light at the shore were Africans. Somewhere behind the scenes there was a European captain. He had joined us for dinner. But the rest of the crew was black. My Belgian fellow passengers did not find this remarkable. But I – coming from British territory – did. Had we not been told, again and again, that 235

RHODESIA blacks were simply not ready for such responsible work? On the Rhodesian railways, too, Africans had been prevented from driving engines. Roy Welensky’s Railway Workers’ Union had seen to that. Yet, shortly after my train had crossed the Rhodesia–Congo border black drivers had taken over and we had chugged along for two days and one night without any of the predicted disasters. Then I had boarded this vessel. What a curious caravan it was that floated us down the Kasai. At its centre was our miniature luxury liner – gleaming white – as white as the gloves of our waiters: six or eight cabins, a gauzed-in lounge cum dining room and a sundeck with deckchairs. But attached to our liner were four low metal barges, tugged along by our powerful engines. Two of them carried cargo, but the other two were packed with African passengers. I had climbed down to explore, having discovered a Bemba-speaking acquaintance down there. Half of their barge consisted of a dormitory – two tiers of bare iron bunks. I was reminded of engravings of slave ships bound for America, long ago. The back half was open to the sky but a spine of simple cooking ranges ran down the centre. Charcoal fires glowed in these ranges and women in colourful garments fanned the flames as they fried plantains. Musonda, my Bemba-speaking acquaintance, asked whether I had heard the echo? What echo? He stood by the railings of the barge, made a funnel of his hands and called towards the jungle: ‘Afrika!’ And so dense was the vegetation that the echo called back: ‘Afrika!’ ‘Afrika,’ I, too, shouted and the jungle replied. Now one of the women frying plantains – a baby tied to her back – joined us: ‘Congo!’ she shouted, and back it came: ‘Congo!’ Before long the railings were lined with African passengers calling to the wild, and the wild replied. I went to bed wondering what commotion we might have stirred among the beasts of the jungle. The third or fourth night – approaching the point where the mighty Kasai joins the even mightier Congo River – I stayed up late, drinking with a Flemish official. He spoke good English and at that time I spoke no French. Well past midnight the thud of our engines stopped. The men on the bridge turned a searchlight down on the dark stream. There was a splash and we saw a man swimming towards the shore. He carried with him a thick rope that he lashed firmly to an overhanging tree. We had tied up for the night. ‘Look,’ said my Flemish friend, ‘water hyacinths’. He had lectured me earlier about this ecological disaster: someone, he blamed American missionaries, had introduced a decorative plant from the 236

SEARCHLIGHTS IN THE DARK southern states of the USA. The plant had proliferated disastrously. There was a danger now it would choke up the entire river system, the communications artery of the Belgian colony. Vast sums were being be spent to keep the river free for navigation. The Kasai tributary was, so far, clear. Plants do not float upstream. What beautiful flowers, these hyacinths, and what a disaster! My companion went to bed. He said he would reach his post early next morning. The cooking fires on the barges had long been doused. The steward, reluctantly, brought me one last whisky. The moon rose, shimmering on the river. The dark waters flowed past us and dark bundles of flowers floated past us towards the sea. What lay ahead? Helicopters sweeping low, spraying DDT over Leopoldville (now Kinshasa); the shrivelled widows of fishermen dragging themselves from lowly huts to the soaring cathedral of Brazzaville; the raucous frogs of Douala; the little courtyards of Lagos crowded with busy handloom weavers; the skyscrapers of Ibadan rising above an adobe city; the mud palaces of Oyo and Akure; the great castles of Accra, Christiansborg, Ussher Fort and James Fort; the long bars in raj-like clubs where the new rulers sipped their whiskies from glasses the old ones had set down only a few months earlier; and the little twinkling lights in open-air nightclubs, coming to life and vitality as the evening cooled; the proud, laughing, long-legged Ghanaian girls who insisted, no, demanded that I spend the night jiving with them, clumsy dancer though I am. And Comfort, beautiful, charming, kind Comfort: in her embrace I tried to overcome my Rhodesian taboos – and failed. I cursed the land that had been my abode for 20 years.

237

Chapter 14

The watch on the Rhine Not until nine years after the end of the war did I, at long last, brace myself to visit Germany. Of course, my own homeland, those beautiful reaches of the River Oder, was no longer German. ‘Wir danken unserm Führer.’ I had heard thousands chanting that in unison, long years before: ‘we thank our leader.’ That was after he had seized the Sudetenland. Did those thousands remember it when he had lost them Silesia and many other lands that had been German for many centuries? Did they remember it when millions had to suffer ‘ethnic cleansing’? I had a pressing invitation from Gerhard Neumann, the painter. He and his family were spending their holidays at a mountain spa. I had agreed to join them, knowing I would be among friends – friends well tried in adversity. But! I sat on the French side of the Rhine, in Strasbourg. Three long days I wandered the streets of that city. I drank too much. The wine was good. Could I cross into that country? Sure, I would feel safe with the Neumanns, but what about others ... all those people I would pass in the street? Had this one shoved Aunt Helene into a cattle truck? Might that be the man who had machine-gunned the vivacious girls in my class photograph? Did that third one murder Uncle Max? Three or even four times I had studied the fine stained-glass windows in the cathedral. I almost knew the guidebook by heart. I had photographed the picturesque half-timbered houses overhanging narrow lanes. Back in my hotel, sleep just would not come. Memories of those last years in Germany kept floating back. I had a headache. Besides, there was an irritating noise that kept me awake: a rhythmic tapping: Tap-tap. Pause. Tap-tap. Another pause. Tap-tap-tap-tap. It was always the same rhythm. What did it signify? ‘Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Führer.’ No, that did not scan. ‘Deutschland erwache. Judah verrecke’? No, that did not scan either: ‘Germany awake. Jews croak.’ In the end I roused myself from my torpor, got out of bed and went to the window. In the road below there was a woman walking up and 238

THE WATCH ON THE RHINE down slowly – a prostitute. She was trying to attract custom by tapping the pavement with her umbrella. At the next corner there was another, tapping the same rhythm. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap. I watched, with fascination, a curious mating dance: a potential punter circled the woman, appraising her. She, in turn, looked him over. There was some discussion, negotiation. In the end a deal appeared concluded. She led him into an apartment house opposite my hotel. A light came on. A curtain was drawn. I returned to my bed and fell into an uneasy sleep. On the third day I checked out of my hotel to force my own hand. That afternoon I drove to the Rhine bridge. There was a long queue of motorcars. It was a relief! I decided to come back later that day when the queue had subsided, or perhaps early next morning? But no! I could not face the thought of checking back into that hotel. Wouldn’t the receptionist snigger? No doubt he had observed others, others like me. I sat in a café. At the adjoining table there were men quaffing beer from litre mugs. They were conversing in Alsatian German – difficult for me to follow – and becoming noisier. So what made this side of the Rhine so different from the other? Wasn’t Alsace ethnically German? Hadn’t this province been ‘brought home to the Reich’ by Hitler? Strasbourg equals Strassburg. These unruly men – they too might have served in the Waffen-SS. No need to cross the river for suspicion to poison one’s thoughts! I recalled that Strasbourg did not have a happy history, not for Jews. Among these picturesque alleys an atrocious massacre of Jews had taken place once. When, I could no longer remember, perhaps in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Two nights and three days later, on the third evening, after dark, I drove to the border post. Harsh lights flooded the customs and immigration shed. There was no queue. In fact, mine was the only car there. I got out. Behind a counter a German immigration officer was absorbed in his newspaper. I have no recollection of his features – only of his uniform. In Britain immigration officials wear civilian clothes. I scrutinized his green uniform. I do not think I was aware what it was I was looking for. In retrospect I know: Among the insignia on his collar there was no swastika. He looked up and called out ‘Grüss Gott!’ This was the greeting Herr Lerche, my first teacher, had used to start each day’s proceedings. ‘God greet you.’ Much warmer, more southern, than the usual northern ‘Guten Morgen.’ We had replied in chorus ‘God greet you, Herr teacher.’ But when Krajewsky had replaced Lerche we had been 239

RHODESIA made to stand up, stretch out the right arm and call ‘Heil Hitler’. ‘Grüss Gott,’ said the immigration officer, but seeing the cover of my passport he switched into English. How long did I wish to stay in Germany? What was the purpose of my visit? I replied – in English – but as I did so, he paged through the passport. Suddenly he stopped, looked up astonished and exclaimed in German: ‘Ein Schlesier!’ A Silesian! He rushed out from behind his counter and took my hand in both his hands: ‘a hearty welcome. A man from Breslau! I’m from Oels myself.’ ‘That’s not all that far,’ I ventured, trying to remember exactly where Oels was – or had once been. ‘Twenty-five kilometres,’ he said, ‘Is this your first time back?’ The warmth of his welcome was so unexpected that I was disoriented. It had never meant much to me to be a Silesian rather than, say, a Rhinelander or a Pomeranian. Nor had it to my parents. German, yes, there had been a time we had certainly felt German. But this man in the green uniform suffered from powerful nostalgia for the lost province. We chatted. There was no one else waiting to cross so late in the evening. He asked about Africa. Then, incautiously, he made a remark that Germans had made to me before and frequently since. It has needled me into bitter responses. What he said was: ‘you left in 1939? You were lucky. You were spared those difficult times – the bombings, the Russians, the Poles.’ Confronted by such a remark I have often hit back: ‘very lucky. So lucky we would have been spared those thousand bomber raids even if we had not left. Why? Because we would have been murdered before the raids began.’ Faced, on a later visit, by a particularly self-satisfied beer-bellied Bavarian I have done worse: ‘you would have murdered me before those air raids began.’ But that evening the tension of the previous days had given way to relief. The man’s welcome had been so warm, so human. Certainly this one man could not make me forget millions of murders, but I felt no urge to rub his nose in the sins of his compatriots. Perhaps he himself had been deported from Silesia in a cattle truck in the middle of winter. If not he, then probably others of his family were. I shook his hand, got back into my car and drove into the dark. ‘Grüss Gott!’

240

Index Aberdeen, 162 Abruzzi, 48 Abyssinia, 54 Accra, 237 Adams, Pop, 180 Adwa, 53 African National Congress, 157, 197, 204, 205, 207, 209–11, 213–16, 218 Ahrends, Walter, 70, 71, 100, 202 Akure, 237 Algeria/n, 188 Almassy, Dr (pseudonym), 151, 152 Alsace, 239 Amazon River, 22 Amsterdam, 86, 90 Angoni, 120, 121 Ankara, 211 Annaberg, 35, 84 Archer, John, 117 Argentina, 10, 70, 90, 100 Armitage, Mr, 118, 119 Aschheim, Frau Dr, 51 Asia, 53 Atlantic, 96 Attlee, Clem, 205, 206, 207 Auschwitz, 19, 38, 100 Australia, 10 Austria, 77 Bach, Dr, 42 Balaclava, 149 Bamberger, Ludwig, 25 Banda, Aleke, 117 Banda, Dr Hastings, 117, 208 Barclays Bank, 180 Baron, Ben, 156 Barotse, 180, 192, 193

Barotseland, 191 Basutoland, 161 BBC, 117–18, 154, 176, 202, 209–10, 212 Bechuanaland, 161 Beira, 107, 111 Beit, Alfred, 155 Belgian Congo, 134, 137–9, 219–20, 235–6 Belgium, 152 Belsec, 100 Bemba, 121, 181, 183, 186–7, 211–12, 236 Benares, 108 Berg family, 20 Berlin, 7, 18, 21–3, 28–9, 31–2, 36, 55–6, 67, 80, 94, 96–7, 99, 104, 126, 180, 213, 231 Berrington, Captain (pseudonym), 163, 168–71, 174, 214 Berrington, Genevieve (pseudonym), 170, 171 Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, 12, 17, 25 Bleichröder, Herr, 17 Bloch, Benno, 91, 92 Bloch, Aunt Helene, 68, 238 Bloomsbury, 232 Boer War, 113, 158 Bohemia, 47 Bologna, 151 Bolsheviks, 37, 72, 131, 155 Botha, Andrew James, 201 Bowmaker, Mr, 125 Brady, Colonel, 144 Brauer, Frau, 20 Braun, Otto, 52 Brazzaville, 119, 237

241

INDEX Brecht, Bertolt, 83 Breslau, 5–7, 13, 21–2, 25, 27–8, 37, 39–41, 46–7, 49–50, 59, 62–3, 65, 68–70, 74, 77, 79–81, 86–7, 89, 92, 95–9, 114, 125, 128, 150, 159, 202, 213, 221, 240 Britain, 31, 78, 113, 145, 155, 172, 174, 175, 193, 200, 204, 239 British South Africa Company, 123, 142, 148, 195 Broken Hill, 108 Brook-Williams (pseudonym), Mr, 171 Brown Shirts, 7, 40 Buchenwald, 62, 65, 83 Buenos Aires, 71 Bulawayo, 127, 129, 142, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155 Bulgaria, 133 Burma, 222 Cairo, 79, 124 Cairo Road, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 137, 226 California, 10 Cambridge, 175 Caminer family, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110 Cape, 79, 124 Cape Town, 114, 139, 159, 234 Carl, Mr, 96, 97, 99 Carlton Hotel, 136 Central African Broadcasting Service (CABS), 149, 176, 177, 196, 222 Chamberlain, Neville, 78 Champagnya (driver), 163, 164, 166, 168 Chikumbi, 203 Chilembwe, John, 117 Chilenje, 222 Chipata, see Fort Jameson, 172 Chiradzulu, 117 Christiansborg, 237

Christie, Agatha, 172 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 211 Clarke, Mopani, 123, 124 Coillard (missionary), 195 Colonial Office, 201, 207 Comfort (Ghanaian woman), 237 Comintern, 133 Communist Party, 157 Congo River, 236 Conservative Party, 207 Cook Islands, 188 Copper Belt, 121, 122, 169, 184, 186, 187, 193, 203, 217, 218, 220 Corner Bar, 125, 139 Cosel, 20, 31–4, 36, 38, 41, 49, 84, 128, 233 Couvaras (Greek schoolboy), 115 Curran, Kevin, 143, 149 Curzon, Lord, 230 Czechoslovakia, 27, 53, 77 Davel (school bully), 114, 115, 159 Day, Robin, 162 Dimitrov, Georgi, 130, 132, 133 Dohme, Herr, 43 Dolomites, 53 Doris, Aunt, 73 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 161 Douala, 237 Doyle, Patrick, 116, 117 Dresdener Bank, 81 Dreyfus, Alfred, 16 Drogelwitz, 32 Droschkau, 30 Dudley, Commander, 138, 139 Durban, 111 Dutch East India Company, 160 Dzherjinsky, Felix, 132 East Africa, 86 Edward VII, King, 195, 203 Edward VIII, King, 205

242

INDEX Egodade, battle of, 149, 152 Egypt, 27, 73, 221 Eichmann, Adolf, 98 Eighth Army, 163 Einstein, Albert, 71 Elizabeth II, Queen, 203 Elizabethville, 138 England, 66, 71, 91, 95, 109, 113, 127, 136, 139, 142, 167, 171, 172, 179, 185, 195, 206, 221, 233 Eric (schoolfriend), 113, 129 Esslin, Martin, 212, 213 Ethiopia, 54, 67, 79, 134 Eton, 144 Evans, Stanley, 216 Eveready, 177

Fraenkel, Merran, 216, 233 France, 16, 68, 155 Franconia, 74 Franco–Prussian War, 18 Frank, Anne, 24 Frank, Hans, 24 Franklin, Harry, 176, 177, 179, 209 Franscina (local beauty), 115 Fred (schoolboy), 143 Frederick the Great, 4, 21, 40, 48, 92 Freiburg, 28, 29 Freud, Sigmund, 71 Frieda (nurse), 49, 50, 51 Friedrich, Uncle, 36, 45, 59, 79, 80, 87, 93, 108, 159 Fuji, Mount, 22

Fanagalo, 121, 147, 180 Finkelstein, Shmuel, 129, 153 First World War, 18, 19, 22, 27, 43, 54, 64, 74, 77, 87, 93, 108, 119, 139, 161 First, Ruth, 157 Fitzgerald, Erica, 123 Flanders, 56, 108 Foerder, Frau, 97, 98 Fort Hare, 159 Fort Jameson, 172 Fort Rosebery, 168 Fox-Pitt, Commander Tommy, 173 Fraenkel, Arnold, 5, 16–19, 24–5, 29, 45, 48, 55–6, 66, 127 Fraenkel, Franziska, 11, 29–31, 49, 59, 62, 82, 89, 97 Fraenkel, Hans, 4–7, 11–13, 18–21, 24–34, 36–7, 41, 45, 47, 49–62, 65, 70, 73–84, 86–90, 95, 98, 104–5, 107–12, 118–19, 125, 128, 130, 142, 144, 161–2, 166–7, 213, 221, 231, 233 Fraenkel, Margot, 6, 11, 17, 19, 37, 39, 43, 49, 58–60, 63, 65–8, 76, 79, 82–3, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92–3, 105–6, 111–12, 127, 129, 185, 188, 220

Gandhi, Mahatma, 172 Ganges, River, 108 Garment Workers’ Union, 160 Genghis Khan, 40 Germany, 7, 15–18, 21, 23–8, 34–5, 41, 46, 52–3, 58, 62, 64, 66, 75, 77–8, 81, 84, 87, 89, 90, 93–7, 99, 104–5, 107, 113, 118, 128–9, 133, 155, 161, 167, 230–1, 238, 240 Gerson, Herr, 104 Gestapo, 51, 59, 82, 83, 86 Glasser, Mr, 197 Glasser, Mrs, 129 Gleiwitz, 20, 36 Gliwice, see Gleiwitz, 20 Glogau, 18, 24, 37, 55, 56 Goebbels, Joseph, 107, 213 Goering, Hermann, 64, 133 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 12, 62, 161 Goldschmidt, Martin, 6, 27, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 63, 92, 98, 161 Goldschmidt, Sophie, 8, 11, 21, 22, 30, 36, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 64, 93, 151 Gordimer, Nadine, 161

243

INDEX Görlitz, 31 Gotz, Khaver, 152, 153, 154 Government House, 112, 125, 127, 165 Graetz, Aunt Emma, 73 Graetz, Heinrich, 45, 92 Graetz, Marie, 46 Grand Hotel, 137 Greece, 210 Grey, Zane, 138 Greyshirts, 160 Grosz, George, 42 Grynszpan, Herschel, 81 Gujarat, 126 Gutfreund, Herr, 20, 37 Gwelo, 146 Gymkhana Club, 209 gypsies, 67 Haber, Fritz, 21, 22, 93 Hamburg-Afrika Line, 89 Hampstead, 91 Harare, see Salisbury, 177 Haya, 122 Heany air base, 146, 147 Hebron, 72 Hedin, Sven, 53 Heine, Heinrich, 15, 21, 161 Heines, Edmund, 63, 65 Herero rising, 117 Herzl, Theodor, 15 Hessen, 107 Hindenburg, Paul von, 54, 58, 92 Hirsch, Annie, 92 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 22, 24, 35–6, 41, 54, 63–5, 68, 77–8, 90, 94, 107, 118, 158, 160, 239–40 Hitler Youth, 68, 69, 70, 77, 84, 88, 114 Hola Camp, 232 Holland, 86 Hollywood, 28 Holocaust, 96

Huggins, Sir Godfrey, 201 Hungary, 151 Ibadan, 237 Ibsen, Hendrik, 161 Ila tribe, 121 Imperial Guards, 5, 18, 19, 45, 56 India, 160, 172, 183, 230 International Red Cross, 11, 130–1, 13–4 Isaak (market gardener), 140 Israel, 22, 25, 27, 28, 69, 73, 103 Italy, 48, 53, 92, 93, 151, 179 Jackson, Putt, 147 James Fort, 237 Jamieson, Richard (pseudonym), 115, 116 Jamieson, Sjambokaela (pseudonym), 116 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 65, 116 Jesuits, 132, 135 Jewish National Fund, 72 Johannesburg, 45, 93, 105, 106, 108, 111, 140, 157, 159, 160 Johnston, Mr, 137, 138 Jones, Mr, 113 Judaea, 73 Kabulonga Club, 209, 211 Kafue, 134 Kaiser-Wilhelmplatz, 7 Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, 6, 41, 42, 51, 60 Kalahari, 103, 146 Kaonde tribe, 120, 170 Kapiri Mposhi, 139 Kapotwe, Edwin, 173, 174, 207, 214, 219 Kasai River, 235, 236, 237 Kateka, Edward, 222 Käthe (cook), 33, 34, 37, 39 Katzenstein, Captain, 64

244

INDEX Kaunas, 97 Kaunda, Kenneth, 127, 211–13, 223 Kawambwa, 163, 164, 168 Kempner, Friederike, 12, 30 Kempner, Ludwig (Franziska Frankael’s brother), 30 Kenya, 124, 163, 170, 171, 232 Kindertransport, 91 Kinshasa, see Leopoldville, 237 Kittermaster, Michael, 179–82, 184, 186, 200, 210, 223 Kitwe, 210 Klose, Frau, 51, 60, 61, 81, 86 Klose, Herr, 51 Koenigsberg, 143 Koestler, Arthur, 28, 155 Kolchak, Admiral, 131 Kopelowitz, Mrs, 105, 108 Korn, Dr, 65 Krajewsky, Herr, 67, 240 Krämser, Dr and Mrs, 20, 34 Kristallnacht, 5, 60, 63, 76, 82, 83 Krotoschin, 45 Kuhn, Dr, 43, 45 Kun, Béla, 151 Labour Party, 205 Lagos, 237 Lamberti, Tilly, 86 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 12 Lawrence, District Officer, 191, 192, 193, 196, 227 League of National-German Jews, 23, 27 Lealui, 193, 194 Leeds, 136 Léger, Fernand, 20 Legislative Council (LegCo), 197, 204, 207, 208, 217 Lenje, 206 Leopoldville, 237 Lerche, Herr, 40, 53, 66, 67, 240 Lessing, Doris, 161 Lewanika, King, 195

Light Brigade, 149 Lightfoot, Mr, 164 Lightfoot, Mrs, 127 Lilayi, 106 Lisbon, 99 Lithuania, 25, 27, 97, 132, 135 Livingstone, 104, 105, 110 Livingstone, David, 53, 89, 103 Löbe, Paul, 41 Lobengula, King, 148, 149, 201, 202 London, 13, 71, 91, 100, 133, 134, 173, 174, 202, 210, 216, 217, 223, 228 London School of Economics, 212 Lorenço Marques, 181 Lovale, 121 Lozi, 121, 182, 195, 203 Luandui valley, 191 Lubinda, Edward, 193, 194, 196 Lubwa, 211 Luedemann, Dr, 63 Lusaka, 18, 104–11, 113–15, 118, 120, 124–5, 127–30, 134, 136–7, 139, 142, 163, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 185, 188, 190, 197, 203, 210, 212, 217, 229, 231, 233 Lusaka Boys’ School, 112, 113, 165 Lusaka Hotel, 107 Lvov, 3 Lyttelton, Oliver, 216 Maas, 90 Macmillan, Harold, 234 Mainway Hotel, 104, 106 Malan, D. F., 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 Malawi, 117, 177, 226, 234; see also Nyasaland Malawi, Lake, 226 Malaya, 232 Manchester, 91 Mann, Thomas, 83 Marais, J. S., 160 Maria Theresa, 40 Marianske Lazne, 27, 52

245

INDEX Marienbad, 27, 52, 75 Markiewitz, Hannah, 60, 89, 95, 97, 99 Markiewitz, Ken (Cousin Klaus), 48, 50, 69, 77, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 Markiewitz, Martin, 99 Marne, the, 58 Martha (nursemaid), 33, 34, 37 Marx, Groucho, 53 Marx, Karl, 71, 153 Marxism, 72 Masiye, Sylvester, 184, 185 Matabeleland, 146, 151, 152 Matopo hills, 148 Matterhorn, 23 Mau Mau, 232 May, Karl, 138 Mendelsohn, Mrs, 112 Milan, 92, 152 Milner, Alfred, 113 Milton, John, 142 Milton, Sir William, 142 Milton Senior School, 129, 142, 143, 144, 150, 155 Mkushi, 202 Monasch, B. L., 26 Monash, General Sir John, 92 Moscow, 133, 151, 209 Mozambique, 157, 201 Mpashi, Stephen, 181, 186, 187 Mpezeni, Chief, 212, 215 Mufulira, 210 Mumbwa, 172 Mungule, Chief, 205, 206 Munich, 78 Musonda (Bemba-speaking friend), 236 Mussolini, Benito, 67, 93, 151 Mutale, Godwin, 173, 174, 175 Mwanawina III, Chief, 203 Mzilikazi, King, 148, 149

Namushakende, 191, 227 Namwala, 172 Napoleon Bonaparte, 40, 41 Narodnik, 153 National Party, 160 Naumann, Dr Max, 23, 27 Nazi/s, 4, 7, 9, 20, 23–5, 27, 31, 35–41, 51, 52–4, 58–9, 62–7, 70, 74, 80–8, 92, 94, 95, 98, 100, 106, 113, 118–19, 128–9, 132–3, 147, 150–1, 159–60, 202, 213, 221, 230, 231 Ndebele, 148, 149, 152 Ndola, 86, 104, 184, 190, 198 Netherlands, 90 Neumann, Fritz, 34 Neumann, Gerhard (Teddy), 33–4, 54, 84, 85, 86, 20, 238 New York, 71, 99 Ngoni, 187, 212, 215 Night of the Long Knives, 65 Nkhata, Alick, 190, 202, 211, 223, 224, 229 Nkumbula, Harry, 197, 209–13, 215, 218 Nobs’ Hill, 125, 126, 134, 137 Northampton, 91 Northern Rhodesia, 8, 18–9, 25, 28, 30, 79, 86–7, 103–5, 107, 109, 117–18, 124–8, 136, 139–40, 155, 159, 163–4, 174, 176, 177, 204–5, 213–14, 216, 219, 227, 230, 231, 233–4; see also Zambia Northern Rhodesia Regiment, 121 Norway, 118 Ntini, Cyrus, 200 Nuremberg, 24, 51, 88, 151 Nyanja, 120, 121, 139, 183 Nyasaland, 115–16, 120, 177, 179, 200, 208, 211, 216, 221, 223, 226, 234; see also Malawi

Nairobi, 179 Nalolo, 193, 194

Oder River, 9, 15, 31, 40, 238 Odessa, 131

246

INDEX Oels, 240 Ohio, 96, 97 Opitzstrasse, 6 Orange Free State, 113 Ossewa Brandwag, 160 Ostrowo, 43, 46 Otraco, 235 Oxford, 113, 127 Oxford Union, 162, 164 Oyo, 237 PA (provincial administration), 127 Palestine, 15, 22, 29, 62, 72, 74, 78, 92, 150, 153 Palmer, Mr, 140 Papen, F. von, 52 Paris, 20, 71, 81 Paris Evangelical Mission, 193 Park, Mungo, 53, 89 Patagonia, 62 Pearl Harbour, 97 Peking, 185 Peru, 8, 78 Pétain, Philippe, 56 Petauke, 168, 172 Phillips, Mr, 116, 230 Pietzuch, Konrad, 36 Pioneer House, 142, 145, 147 Pointe Noire, 234 Poland, 9, 13, 24–5, 35, 41, 43, 45–6, 72, 75, 230 Pollock, Ella (Franziska Frankael’s sister), 30 Port Harcourt, 234 Potempa, 36 Potsdam, 18 Poznan, 43, 45 Praetorius, Herr, 20 Pretoria, 91, 158 Price, Thomas, 117 Provinz Posen, 46 Prussia, 3, 13, 33, 40, 52, 55, 83 Radio Malawi, 117

RAF (Royal Air Force), 146, 147 Railway Workers’ Union, 219, 235 Rath, Secretary von, 81, 82 Red Army, 40, 150 Red Sea, 221 Red Square, 151 Refugee Assistance Committee, 105, 106, 111 Rehdigerplatz Realschule, 70, 71, 73 Rehovot, 22 Reichstag, 41, 132, 133 Reinerz, 42, 43 Rennie, Sir Gilbert, 165 Rhine River, 238, 239 Rhodes, Cecil, 79, 123–4, 148–9, 155, 195 Rhodesia Railways, 140 Rhodesian Dry Cleaners, 108–11, 165 Rhodes–Livingstone Institute, 216 Richthofen, Manfred von, 64 Riesengebirge, 47 RJF (Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten), 54, 73 Roehm, Ernst, 65 Romagna, Emilia, 152 Romania, 16, 75 Rome, 151, 152 Rommel, Erwin, 163 Rosenberg, Alfred, 24 Rotterdam, 90 Royal Air Force, 64 Royal Navy, 118, 138 Rudolf, Herr, 47 Rusape, 134, 135 Russell, Tim, 172 Russia, 16, 25, 75, 78, 131, 154 Rybakov, Mr, 136, 137, 140 SA (storm troopers), 5, 37, 41, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 119, 213 Säbel, 68, 69, 88 Sadowastrasse, 6 Sahara, 234 St Anne, Mount, 35, 84

247

INDEX Salisbury, 146, 177 San Francisco, 65 San Martino, 53 Saucepan Special radio, 177, 178 Sauerbrunnen School, 66, 68 Schachno family, 86, 90 Schillerstrasse, 6 Schirach, Baldur von, 84, 85 Schirbel, Edith, 93, 95 Schirbel, Peter, 94, 95 Schloss Tost, 17 Schmidt, Mr, 140 Schüller, Frau, 98 Schweinfurth, Herr, 53, 89 Second World War, 28, 36, 93, 176 Sedan, Battle of, 17 Segré, Elfriede, 63, 93 Segré, Emilio, 93 Selassie, Haile, 53 Senn, Mr, 130–5 Senti (cook), 128, 165, 220, 221, 224 Shakespeare, William, 135, 136 Shapiro, Mr, 140 Sharman, John, 186 Shaw, G. B., 161 Shepperson, George, 117 Shiré River, 227 Shona, 147 Siberia, 107 Silesia, 20, 30, 31, 40, 41, 47, 62–3, 64, 81, 93, 186, 238, 240 Sinai, 103 Slovo, Joe, 157 Smollett, David, 91, 92 Smoschewer, Konsul, 47 Smuts, Jan, 59, 158, 159 Snowdon, Mount, 92 Sobibor, 100 Social Democratic Party, 51 South Africa, 45, 59, 68, 75, 79, 80, 86, 93, 112, 118, 126, 140, 157–9, 161, 162 South African Farmers’ Association, 59

South Seas, 22 Southampton, 162, 234 Southern Rhodesia, 103, 113, 118, 132, 134, 135, 146, 149, 150, 152, 155, 184, 197, 200, 201, 229, 234, 235; see also Zimbabwe South-West Africa, 117 Soviet Union, 52, 132, 133, 150, 205 Spicer-Simpson, LieutenantCommander, 140 Spiro, Ernst, 21, 23 Spiro, Georg, 22, 23 Spiro, Max, 25, 61, 69, 78, 83, 238 Spiro, Trudi, 69 Springbok Legion, 160 Square, John, 189, 190, 191 SS (Sturn Staffel), 50, 94, 239 Stalin, Joseph, 53, 150, 151, 155, 160 Stanley, Henry Morton, 53 Stellenbosch, 158 Stephenson, Chirupula, 123 Stephenson, Chisimongana, 123 Stolzenberg, Herr, 4 Strasbourg, 238, 239 Streicher, Julius, 74 Sudan, 204 Sudeten/Sudetenland, 16, 52, 53, 77, 238 Swaziland, 79, 161 Sweden, 64 Sweden, King of, 93 Switzerland, 22, 78, 119, 131, 135 Syria, 29 Tagore, Rabindranath, 161 Taljaard, Mr, 114 Tanganyika, 122, 139, 227 Tanganyika, Lake, 139 Tanzania, 122 Tauentzien, 3, 4 Teagle, Mr, 110, 112 Theal, G. M., 160 Theatre Club, 171, 172 Thorpe, Jeremy, 162

248

INDEX Tichauer, Dr, 62 Tippett, Michael, 81 Tonga, 120 Torquemada, Tomás de, 71 Tost, Count of, 17 Tost, Countess of, 127 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 20 Transvaal, 109, 113, 159 Treblinka, 100 Tropical Institute, 80 Trotsky, Leon, 150 Trumpeldor, Joseph, 153, 179 Ukraine, 153 Umkhonto we Sizwe, 157 Umtali, 201 United Kingdom, 104, 177 Upper Silesia, 17, 20, 34, 35, 36 USA, 15, 30, 75, 78, 92–3, 95–7, 99, 154, 219, 236–7 Ussher Fort, 237 van Straaten (school friend), 147 van Woudenbergh, Mr, 59 Verdun, 56 Versailles, Treaty of, 22, 35, 77 Victoria Falls, 103, 182 Vinyau Society, 227 Vlasov, General, 150 von Lippe-Darmstadt, Prince August Friedrich Wilhelm, 31, 32 von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 24 Wall Street, 210 Wallstadt, 40 Washington, 210 Waterloo, battle of, 144 Watson (petrol attendant), 116, 120–2, 124, 170, 190, 224

Weimar Republic, 19, 22, 32, 36, 41, 51, 62, 64, 74, 125 Weissenberg, Aunt Gerda, 68, 69 Weitzman, Chaim, 22 Welensky, Roy, 217, 219, 235 Wellington, Duke of, 144 Wendriner, Mrs, 8 Werner, Herr, 70 West Africa, 234 Westminster, 172 Whitehall, 229, 234 Wiesenbacher family, 106 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 19 Wilson, Allan, 148, 149 Windhuk, SS, 89, 106 Winnetou, Chief, 3, 88 Witwatersrand, 121, 149 Witwatersrand, University of the, 157–8, 160 Wolpe, Harold, 157, 160 Wolpowitz, Sam, 135–40 Woody M, 158 Wroclaw, 4, 9, 13, 59 Wulfsohn, Tubby, 106, 107, 108 Yamba, Dauti, 207, 208, 228 York, 71, 150, 221 Yusokwakuonga, Chief, 192 Zaire, 134 Zambezi River, 103, 142, 193, 196 Zambia, 122, 127, 170, 174–5, 177, 185, 202–3, 211, 229, 234; see also Northern Rhodesia Zimbabwe, 177, 229; see also Southern Rhodesia Zionism/ist, 15, 23, 27, 28, 29, 72, 74, 153 Zobten, Mount, 23, 47, 79 Zomba, 221 Zulu, 121, 187, 212

249