Their Promised Land by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-11-23T12:24:56+00:00

I do everything quite normally but quite mechanically. Inside I am quite dead except for the constant gnawing anxiety. It is like permanently waiting in the waiting room while someone you love is having an operation—only there is no one now to pop in and out and report progress. I wish that my life could have been more balanced—that I could ever have cared for the children half as much as I care for you. But I have always been entirely wrapped up in you; at your side I could face any hardship, any privation, any sorrow, because I love you with my whole being. Without you I am an empty husk, without soul or spirit or joy.

When I first read this, I was slightly startled, but not because her words revealed anything I wasn’t aware of; they are an honest and touching manifestation of her love. But the letter is alarming too, for it expresses so clearly the dependency that goes with total devotion. And it brought back to mind those feelings voiced by her eldest son, in 1933: “John thinks it foolish of me to miss you, as he could quite well be my husband for once!”

I have no doubt that Win’s most acute anxiety in April 1940 concerned Bernard’s fate. But there was another fear, so far unspoken, in the letters, and above all to her children. When she wrote in 1934 of her dread of what might happen to the family, she might have meant socialism, as propagated in J. B. Priestley’s book. Bolshevism certainly worried her, even after the war with Nazi Germany had begun. When Hitler made a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, she noted that “Russia and Germany seem so cock-a-hoop and so closely united. Will Bolshevism be the next menace? Shall we or our children have to fight next against the attempted domination of the world by the Bolshevists?”

But she knew perfectly well that there was a far greater imminent menace, too awful to dwell upon, and that was the fate of the family in case of a successful German invasion. That she didn’t voice her fear openly for a long time probably had to do with her stoicism, that “British manner” she was so proud of. Speculating on a German victory would have smacked of defeatism. And she made it quite clear later on what she thought of that. Defeatism was for foreigners, or, as Win called them in her letters, “foreign bohunks.”* And this included some of the adult refugees she herself had helped to save.

The Sterns, for example, now living in the house on Templewood Avenue. After receiving a letter from Maria Stern, Win observes, on July 1, 1940, “I am afraid they have allowed themselves to get very bitter. Ernst was never de-Germanised and Hans [Stern] not much better, and I think that they might really do some harm to the cause unwittingly, by their extremely defeatist attitude.”

On July 19, she returns to the

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