23 September 1939
We spend the night at the train station with 300 other people, waiting for a train which never comes. It finally arrives at about 3 p.m. It moves very slowly and I can see the wrecks of burned-out trains, and some freshly repaired bridges. We reach Kalisz at 8 p.m., where we wait for an hour. From there, we go straight on to Ostrów. At 3:30 a.m., after three weeks on the move, I am back at home. Everything is just as we left it, because our aunt lived there while we were away. The first thing we do is have a bath. You can imagine what we looked like at the end of our ‘adventure’!
Edward’s diary breaks off here. Within days, Poland surrendered and his home town of Ostrów was annexed into the Third Reich. As Polish language and culture were banned, all Polish citizens were subject to an intensive programme of Germanization. While the fate of Łódź and its 250,000-strong Jewish community remained undecided, Dawid described the immediate changes in the life of his neighbourhood.
3 October 1939
Though it is just about possible for most clerks, workers and shopkeepers to go back to their work, it’s harder for Jews. Business people, shop owners, middlemen, merchants, etc., all are too afraid to go out in case they are picked up for forced labour and so lose their livelihood. They try selling things door-to-door, like most of our neighbours do—stockings, bread, sugar, knitted clothes, etc. Everyone has something to sell, the goods pass though the hands of dozens of middlemen, wholesalers and traders, but none of this can save the Jewish people from a rapid slide into poverty. My father has no work, he is just suffocating at home. We have no money either. A total fiasco!
4 October 1939
Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to avoid the miserable fate of other Jewish people—forced labour. Some older people talked me into going to school along Wólczańska Street—a shorter route, and I went that way yesterday: there were swastikas on all the houses, lots of German cars, masses of soldiers and local Germans wearing swastikas. I managed to get through it yesterday, and today, emboldened, I went the same way. Near Andrzeja Street a German pupil ran up to me with a big stick in his hands and shouted;‘Komm arbeiten! In die Schule darfst du nicht gehen!’ [Come to work! You can’t go to school!]. I didn’t protest—I knew that a student card wouldn’t help. He took me to a square where some Jews had been put to work picking leaves off the ground. The sadist wanted to force me to climb some 2-metre high fence, but seeing that I wouldn’t do it, he went away. The work in the square was supervised by a soldier, who also had a big stick, and crudely ordered me to fill puddles with sand. I’ve never been so humiliated, I saw the smiling mugs of passersby laughing, enjoying the misfortune of others. The stupid, abysmally stupid louts! It’s they who should be ashamed, our tormentors. Humiliation inflicted by force is not humiliation! But anger, a helpless rage boils inside anyone forced to do this stupid work while being taunted. There is only one answer: revenge! After half an hour’s work, the soldier called all the Jews (some of whom had their caps turned back to front ‘for fun’), lined us up, ordered one of us to take back the spades and the rest to go home. Playing at being magnanimous!
I arrived at school in the middle of the first lesson, late for the first time in my entire school career. The teachers can’t do anything about it: ‘for reasons outside the Jews’ control’. I went home the old way, through Kilinski Street. At home mum was frightened to hear how I’d been forced to work. In the evening we found out that one of the Germans living in our street ‘keeps an eye’ on the Jews in our block of flats. This really upset my poor nervous parents. Meanwhile, at school, they’ve announced that pupils who don’t pay a sum of money will be barred. What’s going to happen to me?
CHAPTER TWO The German Invasion of Western Europe April-September 1940
‘Please send me a map of France, Belgium and Southern England’
From September 1939, Britain and France had been preparing to defend themselves against Germany’s Blitzkrieg, or ‘lightning war’, which had defeated Poland so quickly. Britain had no conscript army and spent the opening months of the war building up its manpower, while sending the five existing regular divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) across the Channel to France in December. France called up all 101 divisions of its army, still haunted by the experience of the First World War. Many soldiers were deployed to the Maginot Line, concrete defences built along the border with Germany, which the French hoped was inviolable and would prevent a surprise attack. By the spring, Hitler had already postponed his invasion of Western Europe twice, once because of the autumn mud and the second time after an intelligence breach.
To the majority of people in Britain and France in the winter of 1939-40, the war hardly seemed real. Aside from the absence of enlisted fathers, sons and brothers, nothing much seemed to happen. In London and Paris, cafés and restaurants were full; theatres and cinemas opened as usual. In Britain the period became known as ‘the phoney war’, in France ‘la drôle de guerre’, the funny or odd war. Many of the British children evacuated from the cities in September 1939, in anticipation of devastating German bombing raids, returned home. By April 1940 the German generals had drawn up a new strategy and were now waiting for a period of favourable weather to launch their offensive in the West.
Seventeen-year-old Herbert Veigel, from the provincial town of Heilbronn in southern Germany, had just completed his training in radio communication with the Luftwaffe. On the outbreak of war he had signed up as a volunteer, lying about his age and forging his father’s signature. Six years in the Hitler Youth had groomed him as a soldier and prepared him for the ‘unavoidable war’ to win new German ‘living space’ in foreign lands. Soldiering also offered him an escape from his pious parents and the tedium of school. The youngest boy of seven siblings, Herbert had often felt overshadowed by his elder brothers’ academic and sporting successes. Now that three of his brothers, all devout Nazis, were fighting for Germany, one already decorated for his part in the invasion of Poland, Herbert was determined not to be left behind.
Thirteen-year-old Parisian Micheline Singer’s main experience of the war so far was the flattering attention she received from British Expeditionary Force troops stationed in France. When war was declared the previous September, Micheline and her family had been staying with relatives in the Normandy town of Verneuil. Her father enlisted immediately, while the rest of the family stayed on in Normandy rather than return home to Paris, the more likely target of a German attack. Micheline’s mother struggled on her own to rein in her increasingly independent-minded daughter.
In England, sixteen-year-old grammar school boy Brian Poole could not wait for the war to speed up. He was impatient to leave the Boy Scouts and enlist in the armed forces. An only child, Brian lived in the Cheshire village of Lostock Gralam, an hour’s bus ride from Manchester. A year earlier Brian had signed up for a penpal scheme, and he and New Jersey schoolgirl, Trudie Lach, now also sixteen, had been exchanging regular letters across the Atlantic. Brian had initially introduced himself, describing his hobbies as ‘stamp collecting, model aeroplane building, keeping birds, cycling’ and scouting. When Brian wrote to Trudie that April, almost exactly a year into their friendship, they were still getting to know each other.
5 April 1940
Dear Trudie,
Thanks for the mags. You want a snap of me, do you? Why to look at my face? Wouldn’t it be better if you did not? I am afraid you might stop writing to me, and that would never do. Anyhow I have not got any good ones so I will get one taken. Have you a new one of yourself?