‘Don’t leave us under the barbarian’s yoke’
By January 1941, 290 million Europeans were living under Nazi rule, with Hitler declaring that within ‘a hundred years’ the German language would be ‘the language of Europe’. Britain and its Empire now fought alone to prevent Germany’s complete domination of Europe west of the Soviet border. Churchill was determined to ‘aid and stir the people of every conquered country to resistance and revolt’, and planned to be ready to launch a land attack by 1942, having received the ‘tools…necessary for victory’ from the United States, under the Lend-Lease scheme.
Inside the countries of German-occupied Europe people were treated according to Nazi racial policy. Even the daily food rations were allocated according to race, with Jewish Poles clearly intended to starve on 184 calories a day compared to the French on a ration of 1,300. In France there was an element of ‘cooperation’, albeit on unequal terms: France would be plundered but not completely exploited. While the Germans expropriated coal, food and works of art, a French administration continued to exist, universities and schools remained open and the south of the country remained nominally French. In the east, Poland had ceased to exist as an independent country and its lands were taken over as extra ‘living space’ and resettled by Germans. Schools and universities were shut down and the German language imposed. The country’s 3 million Jews were taken from their homes and enclosed in medieval-style ghettos, where they were forced to work for the German authorities.
Dawid Sierakowiak and his family were evicted from their home in Łódź in May 1940 and moved into a ghetto created in the city’s slum area. A perimeter fence sealed in Łódź’s Jewish inhabitants, separating them from the rest of the city, renamed ‘Litzmannstadt’, which was then renovated and resettled with Germans. With no school to attend, at sixteen Dawid was confined to a narrow, perpetually hungry existence in which he and his family struggled to keep their dignity.
In England, Brian Poole had spent the remainder of 1940 enduring the Blitz. A raid on Manchester, in December, had destroyed his father’s office and much of the city centre. Apart from a few gaps in their correspondence, which they put down to shipping losses, Brian and Trudie continued to share details of their lives on either side of the Atlantic.
By the end of July Micheline Singer and her family had moved back into their flat in the fashionable eighth district of Paris, just off the Champs-Élysées. The occupying Germans transformed the area around Micheline’s home: the hotel opposite was requisitioned for high-ranking administrators, the Wehrmacht took over the ministry next door and the Gestapo based themselves just around the corner. Some things continued as before: Micheline and her best friend, Yvette, were back at their old girls’ school, the Lycée Racine, where normal lessons resumed, though they now had to learn German.
After six months under German occupation, Micheline remained passionately Anglophile.
11 January 1941
I haven’t made any good New Year’s resolutions this year except to fight ferociously if we get the chance to revolt against the Bosches. I know how to fight! Last year a boy misbehaved with me and I broke three of his teeth.
I think the thing I love most about England is the Royal Air Force. I am mad about it and I would like a member of the RAF because he would be English and a pilot. That’s one of the reasons why I want the English to win. But I am devastated because I looked at myself in the mirror with my skirt that’s too short and my curls and realized that though I feel grown up because I have read loads and have quite a lot of experience, I don’t look it. I would so like to look like a young woman on victory day, because…oh, what a lot of nonsense I write!
15 January 1941
I keep trying to persuade myself that swedes and margarine are delicious.
The day before yesterday Yvette was listening to the radio when she heard a new song:
Hitler…I can’t bear the name…he’s a pig, he smells, he is finished…
Unfortunately the signal went and she didn’t hear the rest.
Here’s another joke: What is the smallest meadow in the world? A Bosche’s uniform because there’s always a cow [slang for police] in it.
17 January 1941
I was weighed on Tuesday and I’ve lost 2 1/2 kilos since October. Rations! I’ve nicked a pot of jam. I hid it behind my bookshelf. I am ashamed of doing such things because I know I will have to confess them to you, my dear diary. I would never have stolen jam before, I don’t even like it, but now we eat so badly that I am always hungry. Today, for example, we had four lambs’ kidneys, 5 francs each. They weren’t on the ration card, they were very fatty though, and only as big as your thumb. And aside from the food, the gas doesn’t heat up properly (since the Bosches came it’s been useless). At twenty-five to one we still hadn’t had lunch and we had to leave [for school again] at twenty to. So I started with pudding, then ate some potatoes and swede (which still wasn’t cooked, so I left it) and finally left, munching on my minuscule kidney.
19 January 1941
I am in mourning for my silk stockings! They are completely ruined. I first wore them two years ago in Verneuil! So they have done me well. Luckily, Mummy has lots more in the same colour, so she won’t notice if I take some!
I’ve finished the pot of jam.
22 January 1941
A friend of Yvette’s was imprisoned, aged 16, for putting up a poster. He was locked in a cell for three months and when his father went to fetch him he had to take him home in an ambulance because he couldn’t walk. He is very ill after eating nothing but swedes.
We are wondering, with growing anxiety, how this month is going to end. Probably with us eating swedes.
25 January 1941
The weather is wonderful! It makes me miss Verneuil.
I so miss Verneuil and all the English soldiers, I miss our mad parties, the clean air, the trees, the river. I miss my first love, my freedom, bunking off school, the countryside.
Could it be that the first year of the war was the best year of my life? It was the case for too many French people, but we are paying for it now. Despite all my arguments with Mummy, I was happy and I didn’t realize it. I just wanted to be twenty, or a few years older anyway.
A fourteen-year-old’s soul is very complicated. I am depressed because I got a four in English, I didn’t do well in the German test and my class made fun of the portrait I did today. No one really understands me, except maybe Yvette. People treat me like a big baby! But I have a woman’s soul. I know I am pretty, I have big eyes and a beautiful mouth. I love looking at the curve of my eyebrows, I find it soothing. And I know that there are days when I am particularly attractive; on those days I can sense a magnetic attraction. I hate feeling ugly or badly dressed. Are these the thoughts of a ‘big baby’? A baby who knows when someone has looked at her and knows the words, ‘You are pretty, mademoiselle,’ are meant for her.
It’s ten-thirty and I have to turn the light out, goodbye.
Though Britain was still fighting alone, Lend-Lease signalled the end of US neutrality. As if to reflect the shift in relations between their two countries, Brian had decided that ‘yours’ was too formal a way of closing his letters to Trudie and in his last letter he had asked her to come up with an alternative ending.