A story of courage and tragedy that’s a lesson to us all
AND FINALLY
Tomorrow my husband and I should have been returning from a five-day art history trip to Vicenza, Venice and Padua, organised by the Holburne museum in Bath. obviously we were hugely looking forward to our only holiday booked this year. But millions have had to put up with much bigger disappointments in the past couple of months … and ‘put up’ we must.
Yet I’m still astounded by the amount of moaning and sniping that’s going on all around.
Some are furious because we were locked down at all, while others are livid now Boris Johnson has suggested ways towards
conditional easing. Sometimes I despair. Surely we weren’t always a nation of weedy whingers, expecting to be kept ‘safe’ from wicked witches and stamping our feet if Nanny State doesn’t deliver the ‘happy ever after’?
So let me give you another story — that of a very special man I knew. He’s in my thoughts because today would have been his 100th birthday.
The same generation as Captain Tom moore and my parents, but a German Jew, Dietrich Hanff came to Britain as a refugee in 1939, aged 18. He was taken in by people who later became my friends: the brilliant, visionary artist and educationist robin Tanner (1904-1988) and his writer wife Heather. Through charitable contacts, these wonderful people heard of the young man who needed his fare paid and employment to escape the Nazi terror. ‘Dieti’ became their loving foster son.
He had left behind his whole family. on April 2, 1939, his parents wrote to him in England: ‘Dearest . . . we took our coffee together, alone, without you... All the day long we follow your journey in our thoughts.’
Imagine their sadness — while the swastika flags fluttered outside and the synagogues burned.
The next part of their letter is poignantly brave: ‘You are an intelligent, practical creature, readily able to adjust to a new situation. moreover you will certainly be welcomed and treated well... So cheer up: you will pull through.’ How I love that stalwart ‘cheer up’. Isn’t it a lesson to us all?
Dietrich’s dad went on: ‘That we should find the parting unbearable and ourselves alone and bereft we don’t need to tell you. Especially hard for mutti, but she tried to pull herself together... we’ll make a real effort to be brave as you urged us to be. God grant that your wish be fulfilled and that we may all soon, very soon, be reunited in peace and happiness.’
It was not to be. For Dieti’s parents, grandparents, brothers, aunts and uncles all perished in concentration camps. meeting him many years later, retired after a long teaching career, it was hard for me to reconcile his gentle, beaming face and generosity of spirit with the tragedy of his life.
But I thought of him a week ago, as we celebrated VE Day — because that (the vile totalitarian cruelty of the Nazis) was what we fought and defeated. Never forget. And never compare anything we have to endure with what the generation of Dietrich and Captain Tom and my parents had to face — no doubt all encouraged to be brave and ‘cheer up’.
much is asked of us in life. of course, people face real problems — including money, marriage and mortality. But how many have experienced heart-rending sacrifice like those German parents?
or the desperate courage of 18-year-old Dieti (equal, of course, to that of all the other young men who went to war) who knew the terror of oppression, then left his homeland at the darkest time to find sanctuary in ours? Then suffered agonising horror of hearing news of loss after loss...
of them? So I just wish people could now try to keep things in perspective — for their own sakes. we, too, can ‘pull through’.
Please, let’s stop grieving for cancelled holidays and all the other things we expect as a right.
At least the vast majority of us have a chance of being ‘reunited in peace and happiness’ this side of the grave.
Happy birthday, Dietrich.