In Lands Not My Own: A Wartime Journey

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WILNO: A ROMANTIC PRELUDE On one of the last days of March 1940, I got up late enough to save myself the expense of breakfasting. The weather was bleak, rainy, and hopeless. So was my mood. There was no hope in the war, and there was no hope for myself. As I came downstairs from my attic and reached the lobby, with its air of departed splendor, I found an official letter waiting for me on the marble table. The envelope had the words on his majesty's service on its front, but I was not anxious to open it, for I had had many such letters before, and they all commenced with "We regret..." When I did open it, neatly and without haste, there it was! The impossible had happened: I was allowed to join the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as an aircrew. As I read the letter from the Air Ministry, sent as a result of Sir Samuel Hoare's personal intervention, I knew that I had been given the chance to take part in the struggle against Nazism, and I could not help thinking how strange it was that a letter from an unknown ministry in an unknown city should end one and open another chapter in the life of a twenty-two-year-old Polish Jew living in Brussels. I was born in Wilno on November 30, 1917, while the Germans were still occupying the city and people were dying in the streets from hunger and typhus. From my earliest childhood I was enthralled by its two rivers, the castle, the hill of the Three White Crosses with its pagan traditions, the woods covering the gentle heights that surround the amphitheater in which Wilno lies. As I grew up, my love for my native city grew as well, and I was proud to know that many well-traveled foreigners called Wilno "the Florence of the North." My father and mother spoke Yiddish between themselves and to their children--the Yiddish of Wilno, clear and agreeable to the ear. When I was very young, my sisters mostly spoke Russian. Later they spoke Polish, so I learned to understand and speak all three languages almost simultaneously. The first language I learned to read and write was, however, Hebrew, followed soon by French. My mother was a woman of old virtues and prejudices, with an iron will that spared nobody--least of all herself. Intensely religious, she followed every command of Israel. She would spend the long winter evenings and nights in darkness if there was nobody at home on Friday or Saturday to turn on the electric light, and she was scrupulously honest. It was my mother who first introduced me to England. She told me that after two thousand years of wanderings, persecution, and abasement, a great noble people called the English, who lived on an island where it always rained and the sun was hidden by a constant fog, had given us back Judea, in an agreement drawn up in 1917. My father, as far as I can make him out, was predominately a skeptic. He never protested against my mother's bigotry but did not encourage it. He certainly had more respect for the wise atheist than for the foolish devotee. Nor did he believe in the Jews being a chosen people. Very early in my life he began to explain the Bible to me. He never dwelt on the ritual laws and the historical record it contains but drew my attention instead to the perpetual search after justice and truth to be found in its pages. At home the atmosphere was very Jewish, but once I was outside, my environment was entirely Christian. Very soon I found myself facing the problem of having to achieve a synthesis between the two. This I did quickly and without much pain once I had started my studies in a Polish school. I became an enthusiastic student of Polish history and literature, so much so that I became the pride of my school in both and forgot my Hebrew entirely--a loss I now feel acutely. It was easy for me to achieve this synthesis, because the history of Poland appeared to me to have a moral sense, to have been the story of a struggle between good and evil, a consta