Life Lines
Malcolm Elliott reviews a moving account of what it was like to be Jewish in Hitler’s Germany
Some things in life are just beyond our imagining. What it was like to be faced with the gas chambers and ovens of Buchenwald is, mercifully, not in our own experience and, for most of us, the nightmare belongs to past history. Yet the fact of the Holocaust, and the fate of six million men, women and children, must not be forgotten if we are to ensure that such evils never recur. Ruth David knew the reality of these things in her own childhood. She endured daily rejection by her non-Jewish classmates and the horrors of Kristallnacht, when windows, crockery and furniture in her home were smashed. Her father and eldest brother were arrested, beaten and taken to Buchenwald. Local villagers trashed everything, including the preserves her mother had carefully stored on the pantry shelves for winter. Her parents eventually perished in Auschwitz in 1942.
Ruth’s father owned a small factory that employed many local people until it was confiscated by the Nazis. Ruth was eventually given a place on the Kindertransport, a shipment of nine thousand children sent to England just before the war broke out. This was a Quaker initiative to rescue children, a few hundred at a time, between the end of November 1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939. The Nazis refused to allow parents to accompany them. England was the only country to devise such a scheme. By the end of the war the Jewish children that remained, one and a half million of them, largely from Eastern Europe, had been murdered.
Ruth told the story of her life as a refugee in a previous book, A Child of our Time. Now she has written a second volume, entitled Life Lines, based on the letters her parents wrote to their children in Argentina, the USA and England before they were transported to concentration camps in France and Poland.
The book is, however, much more than a collection of correspondence. Ruth has tied her personal history to what was happening in the rest of the world by adding commentaries to each letter, describing the major events of the time in Germany and elsewhere. It is a masterly account of just what it was like to be Jewish in Germany during Hitler’s period in power. What stays in the mind is not the crudity of Nazi propaganda or the evil of anti-semitism, which has been part of our Christian heritage for generations. What is more shocking is the extent to which ordinary ‘decent’ people were able to accept the twisted logic of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, treating their former friends and neighbours as unworthy of respect, to be spat at and robbed of all dignity.
Nor can we feel any sense of superiority at the behaviour of the rest of the world. It is so much easier to pretend that asylum seekers are just economic migrants, and to put obstacles in their way, instead of giving them sanctuary. One of the most shocking facts recorded in the book is the story of the steamship St Louis taking its cargo of refugees seeking asylum in America in 1938. It was not allowed to land at any port, not even in Cuba, and eventually had to return most of its desperate Jewish asylum seekers to perish in Germany.
It is a relief to read of Mina, the loyal German Roman Catholic housemaid, who refused to abandon Ruth’s parents and to whom her mother entrusted a parcel of letters as she and her husband began their last journey to Auschwitz. Mina’s bravery contrasted strongly with the deafening silence of the Vatican.
Life Lines, Ruth David, Christians Aware, £10. Available from www.christiansaware.org.uk or 2 Saxby Street, Leicester LE2 OND
