D Day + some

This 6th June was the 70th anniversary of D Day, the day when Allied troops landed in Normandy to start the liberation of Nazi German-occupied western Europe. Despite the moving coverage given to this anniversary, it is hard to imagine the courage of those who took part, or to quantify the terrible losses of that day. As this summer progresses we should also remember the heroism of others who were called to action for the liberation of Europe.

On 5th June I went to the launch of Paddy Ashdown’s new book, The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance and the Battle for the Vercors, 1944, which tells the story of the French maquis who rose up to challenge the Nazi occupiers of their country, declare an area of free France, and tie-up battle-ready Wehrmacht troops who might otherwise be deployed north.

The Vercors rising was one of the largest resistance actions of the war and, although brutally suppressed, Ashdown argues that ultimately it was nevertheless a ‘cruel victory’. Although I take some issue with this conclusion, that does not diminish the importance of the action in the Vercors, or of this book in assessing it within the wider context of the Allied war strategy, and providing a fine tribute to the men, and women, who served on the plateau. Read my review for The Spectator.

I knew that Ashdown was working on this book because he had been in touch about the role played by Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of the Second World War, and the subject of my last biography, The Spy Who Loved. Paddy describes Christine rather memorably as ‘beguilingly beautiful, extraordinarily courageous and enthusiastically promiscuous’. She was also a brilliantly effective special agent, and ultimately highly honoured for her huge contribution to the Allied war effort.

Christine serving in France, summer 1944

Christine had been parachuted into France some weeks before the Vercors rising to act as a courier for Francis Cammaerts, the rising star of SOE in France who was coordinating resistance plans to support the Allied liberation in the south of the country. Christine’s role was to take messages between the different resistance cells, and help to coordinate the clandestine supply of arms and equipment. Although she and Francis did serve on the Vercors plateau during the rising, her most important work - work which would make her legendary within the British special services - was yet to come.

Francis Cammaerts, 1944

Allied planes dropping canisters of supplies
to the French resistance in the Vercors, summer 1944

The morning after her retreat from the overrun Vercors battle zone, Christine threw herself into her next mission. Over the next few days she established the first contact between the French resistance on one side of the Alps, and the Italian partisans over the mountains. She then single-handedly secured the defection of an entire German garrison on a strategic pass through the mountains. On her return she learnt that Francis, and two of his colleagues, had been arrested by the Gestapo during a standard roadblock check. Christine begged members of the local resistance to mount a rescue operation. Probably wisely, they rejected the idea. At this point in the war they could not afford to risk either the men or the weapons required for such an operation. In any case, the three men were held in a secure prison and due to be shot within days, so any rescue attempt seemed doomed to failure if not suicidal. Undaunted, Christine cycled over to the prison, assessed the situation, and secured the release of all three men on her own…

Francis and Christine returned to work immediately. The American General Patch, who commanded Operation Dragoon (Anvil), was due to land with his troops on the French Mediterranean coast on 15 August. The American forces' plan was to break out of the bridgeheads and fight up the Route Napoleon towards Grenoble with the aim of rendezvousing there on D-Day +90. They had not counted on French support. Francis’s resistance circuit, and connected local resistance groups, felled trees and blew up bridges to harry and redirect German troop movements while clearing the through roads for the Americans. MRD Foot, the father of SOE historians, believed that Patch arrived eighty-four days ahead of schedule as a result of this brilliant work. Paddy Ashdown believes it took Patch just 72 hours to get through, and he cites this work as one of the greatest contributions of the French resistance to the Allied war effort.

Christine sitting by a water duct near the blown-up bridge at Embrun,
Haute-Savoie, France, August 1944

The Germans stipulated that they would only surrender to the Americans. Poignantly, however, in the event they were obliged to surrender to Lt Colonel Huet as well, the French commander of the tragic Vercors resistance. That evening Francis and Christine went freewheeling down a hill in a US jeep to celebrate the victory.

D Day was a harrowing day of incredible bravery and fortitude. As we commemorate the courage of the men who stormed the Normandy beaches, we should also remember their colleagues-in-arms among the courageous French resistance and the British, Polish and American officers who worked with them either in the invasionary forces or with the special forces in the field. Among them were Francis Cammaerts and Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, who shared their goal of a free Europe, and who would never forget their fallen comrades.

Christine paying her respects to those lost at the Battle of Vercors
at a memorial event,  July 1946.

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A Comic Strip War

Can war be seriously examined through art inspired by American comic strips? As a biographer I am fascinated by the different ways in which human stories from the past can be effectively examined and presented, particularly when this touches on my own current area of interest, the Second World War. So I was captivated when a friend and neighbour, Brian Sanders, published a stunningly beautiful and evocative picture book memoir, Evacuee. Sandy, as I know him, is now working on the sequel, about his life in post-war London, and invited me over to have a look.

If you are as stunned as I was by the cover of Evacuee, I should perhaps mention that Sandy has had a wonderful fifty-year career as a professional artist with commissions ranging from magazine illustration, Penguin book covers and postage stamps to being the official artist portraying the making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey during 1964-65, and designing the advertising poster for last year’s acclaimed television series, Mad Men. However, it is Sandy’s work portraying war, and the impact of war on lives, that fascinates me most.

As a young man, Sandy served in 45 Commando Royal Marines during the Suez Invasion and later in Cyprus. His irrepressible talent for capturing the scenes around him was soon noticed by the intelligence officer, and he was recruited into the Intelligence Section to record events, the movement of people and so on, as well as producing occasional private portraits. When he returned to Britain all his drawings were in his sea-kit bag, and had been stolen before he arrived. The only piece he has from this time is the one published in Soldier magazine, below, showing how far from reality the public image of life in the Libyan desert was at the time:

Tripoli 1957 

Sandy never sought a career as a war artist but commissions for various publications, and several series of stamps including those commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Second World War, naturally followed his experience and the trust placed in him as an artist who, as he put it, ‘had been there, and understood what war was’.

Some of Sandy's stamps commissioned to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of the Second World War

Now a pacifist, Sandy has always aimed to report historically rather than comment through his art, letting events speak for themselves. ‘I wouldn’t glorify war’, he told me, but ‘in fact I have advertised war, I have done pieces for Officers Magazine and so on’. It was only when he came out of the Royal Marines that he gained a new perspective on Britain’s involvement in Suez, and his attitude started to shift.

After a rich career in what is called ‘lifestyle illustration of the 1960s', Sandy is now taking a very different look at the Second World War, focusing on his own childhood as a London evacuee in Saffron Walden, a market town in Essex. Free from the constraints of commission or briefs, this is a very personal project, the impact of which comes from both its clear sincerity and its wonderful evocation of time and place.

Sandy told me that his great blessing is that he has always known he had to draw. The Evacuee project began with loose sheets of pictures drawn from memories, and collected in a small black folder until he suddenly realized there was a book there. He found no problem remembering what he saw, and felt, as a child; ‘my problem is eliminating pictures, not finding them’, he told me. Soon he realized that the book was naturally going to be told from the perspective of his younger self in the form of the American comics that he had collected during the war, and long afterwards. In this way the book speaks directly to ‘children of all ages’, from three or four, up to 65 or 70; ‘the people who were there’. As a result Evacuee is great fun, with hundreds of wonderfully evocative visual details, and the echoing refrain that rang in his ears as a boy; ‘because there’s a war on’. And yet although Sandy’s own father survived the war, he makes a point of recording without unnecessary elaboration that those of two of his friends did not.

Evacuee is an honest book and this, combined with the stunning art-work, is where its power lies. ‘It’s about the people that I love, that I loved at the time’ Sandy says simply. Although increasingly conscious from readers’ reactions that the book is seen as a much-loved contribution to social history, his intentions were always just to record and let the pictures speak for themselves. This is a world beautifully observed by a child and reproduced by his adult self, which is at once deeply personal and yet also gloriously familiar. ‘It is deliberately for everyone’ Sandy told me, but because it is his own story it is also compellingly authentic. Surely this is social history at its best.

Sadly Evacuee is currently sold out, but the good news is that as I left Sandy this afternoon he was heading to his studio to work on the sequel about his life in post-war London and Saffron Walden holidays. I will let you know when it is out, but here is a sneak preview of a page in progress:

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The Keeper of the Locks

I love my family. Last year, for my birthday, among other things my mum gave me a well-wrapped cigar box celebrating the Brussels Grand Prix of 1910. It made a light parcel and did not rattle when I shook it, but inside was something rather wonderful.

First was a card that said ‘Mary Smith, nee McCombie, 1895-1984’. I was slightly nervous that I might be facing my grandmother’s ashes but instead, below the card, were two chestnut-coloured ponytails, each tied with string. As a schoolgirl, Mary had worn her hair in plaits. In 1911 when she went out to work, aged 16, she had bunched her plaits at the neck, or curved them round her head. But by the 1920s she had a fashionable flapper’s bob and she kept her hair short for the rest of her life. So at some point she must have decided that her long hair was too much trouble and rather regretfully cut it off, or perhaps it was with a sense of liberation that she had her hair chopped, shocking her rather staid aunts as she marked her transition to adulthood and independence.

Mary as a schoolgirl

Mary with her hair up for work.

I have noticed that when a lock of hair is treasured in a film it is usually lush and shiny, and does not look very real somehow. Not so these girlish bunches, which have split ends and several knots, very like my daughters’ hair which I brush and plait most mornings before school. But her long hair must have held great value to Mary for her to have hung on to it all her long life, and clearly the keepsake resonated with my mother too, who could not bear to part with her mother’s treasured bunches either. 

Mary’s bunches.

With nearly 100 years in a box, the hair has now taken on even greater significance. My own daughters squealed rather delightedly at this family relic from a woman, a great grandmother, who they had never known. But my husband was rather less convinced. ‘Thank goodness it is not a finger’, he said, ‘or even a set of teeth. Perhaps, if it must be kept,’ he added, ‘it could be put to good use, in the mix for some renovating plaster for our walls, or the stuffing for the piano-stool’. My family, he seemed to be suggesting, might be quite capable of keeping anything, and in this he is probably right. Now, however, this box is not just full of hair, it is full of historic-hair, family hair that has been loved and valued by two generations already. Its significance is in its preservation as much as in its DNA. So now I am the keeper-of-the-locks, which sit in their box on the shelf with my prettier old books, some of which themselves were given as school prizes to various great uncles and aunties. 

This year my mum, who has clearly if unofficially given me the job of family historian, wrapped me up another of Mary’s treasures; a medal engraved on the back to ‘M McCombie, 2nd Place, Open Competition Girl Clerks, April 1912’. My granny had come second in the country for her civil service entry exams that year, or at least of those girls taking the exams at the ‘Civil Service and Commercial College’ at 1, 2 & 3 Chancery Lane.

Mary's Medal, front

Mary's Medal, back

A medal seems a much more reasonable thing to keep than some old, slightly tangled hair. Medals are earned rather than grown after all, and they were not once actually part of a human being. But perhaps clever Mary had just as much pride in their hair as her exam results. And, I have realized, it is only the two things together, the hair and the medal, that start to hint at the whole woman behind them, Mary Smith nee McCombie, a smart woman who made her own way in the world, but who also rather romantically refused to ever throw out the long hair of her childhood. Perhaps that is a combination that has a certain power of its own, something to emulate, as well as something to preserve.

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Eglantyne Jebb, The Woman Who Saved the Children

Ninety-five years ago this month, in May 1919, a remarkable woman called Eglantyne Jebb, and her sister, Dorothy Buxton, changed the world.

Many years ago, I worked as a rather struggling corporate fundraiser at Save the Children. One day I came across a line written by Eglantyne, the charity’s founder, when she was also finding it hard work to raise funds. ‘The world is not ungenerous’ Eglantyne wrote, ‘but unimaginative and very busy’. That struck a chord with me, and I became rather intrigued about this woman, who spoke with such immediacy but who is so little known today.

Eglantyne Jebb at her Save the Children desk, c.1921

In 2001 I went on maternity leave to have my first child - thereby showing far less dedication to the cause than Eglantyne, who never had children of her own and worked tirelessly for the charity until she died. As I had two weeks before my due date, I decided to spend a some time finding out a bit more about Eglantyne.

Looking through the papers in Save the Children's archive, then in the charity’s basement, I came across the leaflet below. Although entitled ‘A Staving Baby’, the photograph actually shows a little girl from Austria who is two-and-a-half year old. Her disproportionately large head, compared to her body, is the result of malnutrition.

Eglantyne's leaflet, 1919

In the top right hand corner you can just see Eglantyne’s scribbled word ‘suppressed!’ The exclamation mark shows her personal indignation at the policy of the British Liberal government to continue the economic blockade to Europe after the First World War as a means of pushing through the harsh peace terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Eglantyne believed that the British public was unaware of the terrible human cost of this policy and set out to change things.

In the spring of 1919 she was handing out these leaflets in London's Trafalgar Square, a traditional site for public protest. One account even has her chalking up the pavements with her messages ‘Fight the Famine’ and ‘End the Blockade’, in suffragette style. Eventually, the government had her arrested.

When her case same to court that May, Eglantyne knew that legally she did not have a leg to stand on as her leaflets had not been cleared by the government censors under the Defence of the Realm Act, which was still in place. Nevertheless she insisted on conducting her own defence and, focusing on the moral case, she gave the court reporters plenty to pad out their stories with.

The Crown Prosecutor is the only person in this story with a name to rival Eglantyne’s. He was called Sir Archibald Bodkin, and he did not spare Eglantyne in his condemnation. She was found guilty and fined £5. ‘This’, she wrote to her mother, ‘is the equivalent of victory’, because she could have been fined £5 for every leaflet she had distributed, over 800, or even been given a custodial sentence.

Furthermore, after the session had officially closed, but before the court had been cleared, Sir Archibald came over and pressed a £5 note, the sum of her fine, into Eglantyne’s hands. Technically she had been found guilty, but clearly in the Crown Prosecutor’s eyes Eglantyne had won the moral case. This would be the first donation towards a new fund that Eglantyne and her sister Dorothy now vowed to set up – the ‘Save the Children Fund’.

Daily Herald, 16 May 1919

As you can see from the photo above, of the front page of The Daily Herald, the British newspapers gave the story prominent coverage. Eglantyne was also featured in The Times, The Mail, The Mirror and The Guardian.

But Eglantyne knew that, pleasing though this coverage was, publicity alone would not feed the starving children of Europe. Determined to capitalise on the publicity, she and Dorothy decided to hold a public meeting and see if they could win further support for the cause. Being ambitious women, they booked the biggest venue they could find: the Royal Albert Hall. Reports tell us that in the event, there were not enough seats in the hall for the numbers of people who arrived.

Crowds queuing to hear Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton
talking at the Royal Albert Hall, 19 May 1919

However, to their horror, Eglantyne and Dorothy soon realized that many of the audience had arrived with rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor’ sisters who wanted to give succour to 'the enemy'. At first Eglantyne nervously mumbled her words, but her voice rose with her passion, until she called out; ‘Surely it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death without making an effort to save them’. The crowd in the hall were shocked. Then, in the silence, a collection was spontaneously taken up.

Within ten days Eglantyne, Dorothy and the fledgling Save the Children Fund had invested in a herd of dairy cows to provide a sustainable source of nutrition to the children of Vienna. Thousands of lives were saved, and that was just the start…

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Grandfathers

During a recent sort out, my mum found a small square of newspaper, cut out and neatly gummed onto a piece of glass cut to size. It had been sellotaped too, protecting the ink and turning the paper a deep golden-yellow, but before it was stuck down someone had penciled their name on it in three different places, as well as scratching their initials on the back. The date, handwritten alongside, is 28 June 1919.

The clipping is from the ‘London “Daily Express” Aeroplane Post’, and the headline is ‘Peace Proclaimed.’ You don’t get much of the story, but everything important is captured in sixteen words: ‘The Peace Treaty was signed by the Peace Emissaries of the Allied and Enemy Countries today’.

Dick Mulley's keepsake of the announcement of peace, 1919

The penciled name is ‘R Mulley’. This was my grandfather, Richard Mulley, better known as Dick, then a fourteen-year-old boy with very tidy writing. He was clearly hugely aware of how momentous that day was, marking the end of what was then known as The Great War. Little wonder, since one of his older brothers had served in the Royal Navy and was twice on ships that were torpedoed - although amazingly he survived to run a toyshop in the peace. Dick’s deep sense of moment is captured both in the number of times he scribbled his name on the paper, and in his determination to write so neatly on this small keepsake of history.

I have very little that once belonged to my dad’s dad, although there are a few photos of his many naughty, handsome brothers and long-suffering sisters. I love the fact that this small plaque has survived, a memento of a boy who had clearly been following the war, and had a sense of history as well as of victory. It is also a memento of my father, who must have cautiously held this fragile square of paper and glass, just like I have, and wondered about the boy who grew up to become his father. These two men carefully kept this small cutting safe for ninety-five years.

My husband, Ian, has similarly precious little from his father’s father; in fact he has even less. However, as a child he did inherit his father’s stamp collection, which he carefully stuck in an album bought for the purpose in the 1960s, adding to it as he went. Looking at the individual stamps, however, some of these must have come down from another generation, from Ian’s father’s father, Reiner.

This album contains stamps from all over the world. The smaller the country, the more fabulous the stamp, my dad once told me, looking at his own childhood collection with me. The same is true here, but the most fascinating stamps in this album come from Ian’s grandfather and father’s birth-country; Germany.

Germany first issued stamps in 1872. Sadly there are none in this album from then, but there are two Germany pages, very neatly distinguishing stamps dating from 1949 which were issued in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, ie post-war Eastern Germany, and look suitably Soviet, from an older collection from the Deutsche Reich.

These Reich stamps are fascinating. The oldest, perhaps, is a pretty dark blue one showing a stylised hunting horn for a value of 6 marks. The collection quickly moves up in face-value however to 200, 400 and 500 marks. In the years after the First World War the value of the German mark fell rapidly, mainly as a result of reparation payments and the penalties imposed on German trade, combined with the depression. As the German government printed money, the country experienced rapid, debilitating inflation. German stamps in circulation were overprinted to reflect this. A pink stamp in the album that had been issued at a face-value of 500 marks, had been given a value of 250,000 marks in around 1923, while below it a paler pink 200 mark stamp is overprinted with a value of 2 million marks! Some of these stamps do not even look used, as though even when revalued in the millions they could hardly cover the cost of delivering a letter.

Deutsche Reich stamps from the album, c.1920s

So while, as a lad, one grandfather, Dick Mulley, was cheerfully sticking his newspaper cutting on to some glass to keep it nice, another, Reiner Wolter was - possibly less cheerfully - not sticking stamps onto envelopes, but keeping them safe nonetheless, with a sense for preserving history that was just as keen as Dick’s.

So what happened to these two boys when they grew up? In the Second World War my father’s father, Dick, served as a chef in the navy, cooking Christmas dinner for 1,400 men one year; ie for two troopships. He survived the war, and later worked for the New Zealand Shipping Company. Story has it that one day, in a storm, he chopped his own thumb off but simply sewed it back and got on with dinner.

Ian’s grandfather, Reiner, was drafted too, but he was less lucky. There are several stories as to his end, but the one that seems most likely is that he was sent to the Russian Front, and died or was killed at Stalingrad, with so many others. We don’t really know. His widow, Ian’s beloved German grandma, fell in love again a few years later, with an English soldier based in the British-occupied zone of post-war Germany. They married, and although her older sons chose to stay in Germany, she brought her youngest son, Ian’s father, with her to England when her new husband was posted home. Very little came with them, no photos that we know of, but a few Christmas tree baubles and a small collection of stamps. And she sang wonderful German carols in their house at Christmas time.

So my children have great grandfathers who fought on both sides of that second terrible world war: men who were boys once, and collected small souvenirs of peace – little bits of gummy paper that still survive to tell us something rather wonderful about them, something about being aware of the zeitgeist that they might have recognised in each other.


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Jan Karski, messenger from the past

When we think about the Holocaust today, we mostly remember the victims, perpetrators, bystanders and collaborators. We should also think about those who risked their lives to protect individuals, families and groups, or even in the attempt to end the genocide altogether. Last month, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, I attended an event at the London Central Synagogue organised in tribute to the Polish Catholic, Jan Karski, who attempted just that. After Rabbi Barry Marcus, Cantor Steven Leas and Polish Ambassador Witold Sobków had welcomed guests, Martin Smith’s short film Messenger from Poland was screened, in which Jan Karski told his own story.

Rabbi Barry Marcus opens the Jan Karski tribute evening
at the London Central Synagogue. 

In the winter of 1943, Karski was selected by the Polish Underground State to alert the international community to the mass murder of the Polish Jews by the Nazis. The young former diplomat was already a veteran of clandestine war-work. Taken prisoner by the Russians in the early weeks of the war, Karski had been released in a prisoner exchange, thereby avoiding death in the Katyn forests. In August 1940, having escaped from a second detention, this time by the Gestapo, Karski served as an underground courier with the Polish resistance, smuggling information out of the country. 

Jan Karski, 1943

Eighteen months later he was chosen to bring news of the genocide to the outside world. It was felt that his diplomatic credentials, along with the fact that he was not Jewish himself, made him a strong emissary. To give him even greater authority, Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto where he watched two boys from the Hitler Youth 'shooting mindlessly' into the miserable scene of ‘poverty, hunger and death’. Then, disguised as a Ukranian militiaman, he was taken to Izbica, a Nazi ‘sorting station’ where he watched ‘masses of Jews’ being sent to the Treblinka death camp for ‘liquidation’. Karski reached London in November 1942, where he put a simple plan to the Polish Government-in-Exile. Germany should be leafleted with details of the camps, Karski began, 'so the German nation could not say that they did not know'. The Nazi government should be directly lobbied to stop the genocide, and if they failed to do so the Allies should respond by bombing key sites in retaliation until action was taken. ‘In the name of common values’, the Pope should be called to publically intervene, calling on German Catholics to find their consciences. 'Who knows', Karski argued, perhaps if the Pope threatened to excommunicate those who did not protect the Jewish population, enough Germans might take a stand. Karski also wanted blank passports and hard currency to bribe Nazi officials, and the Polish resistance to operate a strict policy of execution for those who betrayed their Jewish neighbours.

Republic of Poland report for the United Nations, 1942

Karski’s was not the first report of mass killings to reach the West but it was one of the most detailed, an eyewitness account, and considered very reliable. But despite his testimony, the Allies remained largely indifferent to the fate of the Jews in Poland. All those who met Karski gave various reasons why nothing could be done. The Pope took six weeks to respond, and then only stated that he had already done all he could. In Britain Lord Selbourne, who met Karski in place of Churchill, told him that no political leader would comply with the idea of providing hard currency to bribe Nazi officials, which would effectively mean subsidising the enemy regime. Roosevelt ‘looked like a master of humanity’, Karski felt, but seemed more interested in the fate of Polish horses than Polish Jews, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, possibly the most influential Jewish man in the USA, simply said he could not believe Karski’s report. When asked if he was suggesting that Karski was lying, Frankfurter replied only that not being able to believe was not the same as doubting the reliability of the source. Karski was horrified by the lack of action, despite his reaching the highest authorities. ‘I swore to them’, he told film-maker Martin Smith at the end of his interview, ‘as long as I will live, I will speak about it’. Karski was true to his word, but Smith felt that he seemed ‘weighed down by doubt and death’. Karski died in July 2000, believing to the end, Smith told me, that he had achieved nothing. In fact his constant lobbying had helped lead to the development of the USA’s War Refugee Board, an important achievement but not the goal he had set himself. In 1982 Yad Vashem recognised Karski as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 2012 he was honoured with the USA’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and this year, 2014, has been designated Jan Karski year by the Polish parliament. 

Film-maker Martin Smith talks with a member of the audience.

Important though such recognition is, Jan Karski has been honoured as a hero too late. Over drinks after the film, I asked why Karski’s testimony had been so largely ignored. The responses were diverse. Some felt that Karski had been treated by suspicion because he was known to be a socialist. Others, that the Western powers were fearful of giving too much weight to the Jewish question when there was so much general suffering caused by the war. Certainly there was also the refusal to believe, as expressed so starkly by Felix Frankfurter. Above all, however, the feeling was that no government felt justified in diverting any resources from the ultimate goal of defeating Nazi Germany. What everyone seemed to agree, however, was that if we remain silent, then we too, in a sense, are tacit.

During the Second World War, despite Karski’s unceasing meetings with journalists, authors, officials and MPs, and his own writing, the vast majority of people did not know the truth about the genocide until July 1944, when the first Nazi death camp was liberated. Those who did know had other priorities. Today the world has changed. Courageous reporters, and members of the public armed with mobile phones and internet access, have taken the place of brave couriers like Jan Karski, and there are few conflicts around the world where atrocities, state-sponsored or otherwise, go unreported. If anything people feel overwhelmed. General knowledge is not lacking, and nor perhaps is public conscience; what is lacking is clear solutions to these complex situations. What is certain, however, is the importance of constant vigilance and repeated challenges to those who abuse human rights. Perhaps the most significant lesson from Karski’s story is that without knowledge nothing can be achieved, but with knowledge comes both collective and personal responsibility.


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Four Sisters

To mark ‘Women’s History Month’ I am dedicating my March blog to four Russian sisters…

A couple of years ago the Russianist, historian, translator and author Helen Rappaport decided to write about four sisters. I was researching three very different sisters at the same time, so I hoped that collectively we could write about seven sisters, and meet occasionally in north London to toast our progress. Sadly, my chosen sisters fell by the wayside (at least for now), but Helen’s wonderful book: Four Sisters: The Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses was published this week.

The British hardback of Helen Rappaport's Four Sisters

A fluent Russian speaker, Helen is a specialist in Russian history and 19th century women’s history. Her subjects have ranged from a blackmailing Victorian beautician to Lenin’s years in exile, and from the stories of women in the Crimean War of the 1850s to an encyclopedia of female social reformers.

Author Helen Rappaport, photo by John Kerrison

Four Sisters is Helen’s second look at the Imperial Romanov family. In 2009 she examined the last painful fourteen days of the dynasty in her history, Ekaterinburg. Now she widens her lens to provide a deeply moving account of the four Romanov sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

Important chiefly as dynastic assets in their own lifetime, these women were perhaps the most photographed and talked about young royals of the early twentieth century. Presented essentially as beautiful, demure figures, flanking their parents, in gauzy white dresses, it would have been unthinkable that not one of them would find a husband. However, in 1918, they were all brutally murdered, along with their parents, thirteen-year-old brother, and loyal personal staff, by members of the Bolshevik secret police.

Olga, Maria, Nicholas II Alexandra Fyodorovna,
Anastasia, Alexei and Tatiana, 1913
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Fyodorovna_of_Hesse

The fate of the Imperial Romanov family is well-known, and yet this is a story still obscured by confusion, deceptions and myth. Inevitably perhaps, such a tragic tale of innocence and brutality has often been reduced to a binary narrative about good and evil. However, presenting the four Romanov sisters simply as innocent victims without independent character, fault or value, does little to further our understanding. The apparently irrepressible desire to believe that Anastasia escaped her family’s fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, has further romanticised the story.

I asked Helen why these four women’s lives have not been more critically examined before, despite their fame, and about the politics of writing about women who are primarily known for their relationship to, or association with, more famous men.

 ‘The perennial problem with telling the story of interesting women in history’, Helen told me, ‘is the lack of sufficient source material. Sometimes the only way we can learn anything about women is when they are shown as an adjunct to the much more famous men in their lives and the results are not always satisfactory. I don't believe in trying to aggrandise the role of such women, but by taking a close up look at the key role they played - as in the case of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife - one can find fascinating perspectives on the bigger story. Similarly, the lives and upbringing of the four Romanov sisters hopefully sheds much valuable new light on their parents and the whole dynamic of Russia's last imperial family.’

The tragic fate of the Romanov family provides a brutally direct metaphor for the end of Imperial Russia. How did you balance the focus between the personal drama, and the political context?

 ‘I think the reason that people are so endlessly fascinated by the last imperial family has a lot to do with the murder of those five innocent children in 1918. And yes, it is indeed a metaphor for the dreadful, savage and bitter civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup in October 1917. Millions of people died in the first formative years of the new Soviet Russia, many of them innocent women and children. The Romanov children represent the murder of innocence and also the difficulty, even now, that people in Russia have of coming to terms with the savagery of their own past.’

What is new in your approach to the story?

‘The sisters have always been perceived as an adjunct to the much bigger story of their parents and their haemophiliac brother. I had never had any interest in writing standard biographies of, say, Nicholas or Alexandra, nor have I ever considered myself to be a political historian. I was interested in the Romanovs' private, domestic life, as a family and how they interacted with each other.

As a mother of daughters myself, I wanted to write about them as any other young women – i.e. without preoccupation with their status and titles. I wanted to view their development as one would any other developing girls - with the same interests, impulses, hopes and disappointments. I wanted to show their very different personalities and how each of them had qualities that were uniquely their own. This was no bland collective, as they are so often presented, but four very interesting young women who were on the brink of life and who, in their own very different ways, had a great deal to offer.’

How important was your fluency in Russian during your research?

‘My Russian was crucial. There was much that I wanted and needed to read in the Russian original, especially the girls' letters and diaries, even though a lot of source material has now been published and translated. I visited Russia several times to refuel my sense of place, but not so much to discover new things. I found much new material by other means, even without going there. Being in Russia helped me connect with the four girls and their story in an important emotional and spiritual way.’

Finally, how would you like the four Romanov sisters to be remembered?

‘As four very different contrasting personalities who deserve to be remembered more than as just pretty girls in white frocks and big picture hats. They were not a bland collective, they were a fascinating quartet of young women who at heart were decent, loving, honest and inherently altruistic and caring. They deserve to be remembered for the love and devotion they showed each other, their parents and their sick brother without complaint and with a gentle stoicism that I find admirable and touching.’

Maria, Olga, Anastasia and Tatiana
in captivity, Spring 1917
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Nikolaevna 

Helen is passionate about uncovering the neglected truths behind well-known stories and releasing women from what she calls ‘the footnotes and margins’ of history. Four Sisters gives individuality and vibrant identity back to Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, presenting them not just as pawns in the hands of their Imperial family, symbols of an out-of-touch regime, or tragic victims of the brutal revolution, but as young women with hopes, dreams, frustrations and fears of their own. Here they are actors in their own right, each responding distinctly to the circumstances, opportunities and constraints of their lives, and living without the foreknowledge that usually clouds perceptions of them. Their personal stories are told lightly but with such scholarly authority that it is easy to forget how new it is to consider them in this fresh and sensitive way.

History like this shows how women’s lives have often been doubly marginalised, first in life, and then in their retrospective historical treatment. Helen Rappaport not only liberates the Romanov sisters to great degree but, in doing so, she shows how revisiting the lives of women living in the shadow of more powerful men can illuminate history in all sorts of new ways.