A delightfully eccentric dive into the Bonham Carter family
Being called “completely bonkers” by Helena Bonham Carter is quite something, isn’t it? Like Jeremy Corbyn calling someone “really Leftwing”. But that is how the actress referred to the wartime activities of her grandmother in My Grandparents’
War (Channel 4), the first of a fourparter delving into different actors’ eventful family histories.
One only needs to have a passing interest in the actress currently playing Princess Margaret in The
Crown to know that she is an eccentric character, so it was no great surprise to find that an unconventional streak runs through the family. Her father’s side is illustrious – prime minister Herbert Asquith was her paternal great-grandfather, and Asquith’s daughter was Lady Violet Bonham Carter. A mother-of-four and Liberal politician who spoke out against appeasement and the rise of Hitler, she counted Winston Churchill among her closest friends. She championed Jewish refugees at a time when many others did not, offering one family safe passage from Czechoslovakia. Violet feared she had lost her beloved son, Mark, after he was captured in north Africa – remarkably he escaped and walked 400 miles home.
That would be enough incident for any family scrapbook, but the maternal side of the family was also impressive. Bonham Carter’s grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, was a Spanish diplomat based in Paris. He was also Jewish. Fleeing the Nazis, the family joined the exodus to Bordeaux where people were desperate for transit visas to enter Spain, in the hope of continuing on to Portugal and leaving Europe. Propper de Callejón defied the order of his superiors and opened the consulate doors, staying up all night signing passports. He was demoted for his efforts. Neither he nor Violet were “conventional war heroes”, Bonham Carter said, and yet they helped to save lives.
The actress was refreshingly free of theatrics – no tears, just genuine interest and the occasional bit of gallows humour. And it was a nice change to see a programme celebrate the slightly batty upper classes, a world in which grannies are called “Bubbles” and childhoods are spent rolling around a chateau. Tending a horribly injured comrade on the battlefield, Mark Bonham Carter administered two tablets of morphia that Violet had purchased for him in Fortnum and Mason. A more po-faced actor might have focused on the grimness of this tale. Instead, Bonham Carter giggled: “I wish you could buy it now.”
There is a video doing the rounds this week of the film director Ken Loach being asked about anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He had seen no evidence of any such thing. The interviewer referred to a fringe event that had taken place at the party’s conference the day before, asking if the Holocaust had actually happened. Did Loach think that was unacceptable? “I think history is for us all to discuss,” he replied. Perhaps Loach could watch The
Man Who Saw Too Much (BBC One) and then tell us just what aspects he thinks should be up for discussion. This devastating documentary told the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of Boris Pahor, the oldest known survivor of the concentration camps and still sharp at 106.
Pahor, a Slovenian born in Italy, was taken to Natzweiler-struthof in April 1944. Of the 52,000 who passed through the camp in Alsace, mostly political prisoners, 22,000 died. They were slave labourers, treated with unimaginable cruelty by the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, who would go on to be known as the Beast of Belsen.
The horrors were endless, including the 86 Jewish men and women brought in from Auschwitz and exterminated in the gas chambers, their skeletons collected by anatomist August Hirt for a planned exhibition at the University of Strasbourg as evidence of what the Nazis expected soon to be an extinct race.
All of this contrasted with the life that Kramer and his officers were leading: a cinema and a swimming pool; an SS rule book for dog handlers, decreeing that the animals be served a good diet while the humans around them starved.
The programme also raised the ethical question of whether concentration camps should be open to the public. We saw tourists tramping through Natzweiler. “They have even made a car park. A lot of people go and visit the camp first and then ski,” Pahor remarked. That could be a topic that merits discussion. But the history of whether this happened at all? Shame on anyone who doubts it.
My Grandparents’ War ★★★★ The Man Who Saw Too Much ★★★★★