Born in 1900

“Before destroying these manuscripts, have a little patience and read them. Your relative had a questing mind and a certain literary facility.”

Message from beyond the grave

My grandmother, Yetta Bannister, wrote those words on two envelopes, out of many I still have containing her writings. She left them to her daughter, my mother, when Yetta died thirty years ago. Reading those words for the first time sent a chill through me. On no account could I ignore her plea, especially as someone who enjoys writing himself. I had to read the contents of those two envelopes.

My mother clearly hadn’t, in the 28 years between her mother’s death and her own. Nor, indeed, did I in the two and a half years since. And yet I often think of Yetta, and with increasing fondness each time. She was easy to like, perhaps because she found it so easy to like others. 

But still the envelopes remained sealed.

Then a friend sent me a video by Dr Shinas Salaudeen and Merin Joseph, that gives some context to our current Coronavirus challenges. They call on us to think of the experiences someone born in 1900 might have had to live through, and compare them with the rather less harrowing difficulties we’re having to cope with today. And that sharply reminded me, once more, of Yetta: 1900 was the year she was born.

At the age of three, she became part of that mass of humanity turned into refugees by persecution in their home countries. Her family were Jews in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, a bad place when it came to pogroms. Those were attacks by local people out hunting Jews, beating up those they caught and sometimes killing them, breaking shop windows, burning houses, generally engaging in all kinds racist violence while the authorities simply stood idly by.

Her family arrived in London as immigrants, a class of people not generally respected or cordially welcomes anywhere.

Then, as Salaudeen and Joseph point out, someone her age had to live through the pain of the First World War. She became engaged young and her fiancé survived the war despite serving in the trenches, only to die in the Spanish flu epidemic, which killed far more people than Covid yet has.

She saw the economic crash of 1929, and she watched Hitler rise above its rubble to take total power in Germany. Then in 1939, his armies went into action and, in 1941, invaded her former Lithuanian homeland. There her entire extended family, 90 strong, vanished without trace. Did they die in an extermination camp? Or were they perhaps murdered by their own ‘Christian’ neighbours? Many Lithuanians won unenviable reputations for vicious anti-Semitic atrocities during the war.

Thinking of all this, I decided I had to take the plunge and open those envelopes. 

One of them contained a piece entitled On the Wings of Song. Writing in 1946, she remembered June two years earlier, when Nazi Germany was sending the V1 rockets to bomb England. She used a common term of endearment for them,  ‘buzz bombs’, because they would chug along with a buzzing sound from the Continent before their motors cut and they fell to Earth, spreading devastation where they struck.

I think Yetta was right. She had a questing mind and a literary facility:

The Nazi buzz bomb attack on London was at its height. I had lived through a hideous night, punctuated throughout by these infernal engines of destruction. Tired to death, I rose at my usual hour, and began preparing the family breakfast. I switched on the wireless. A man’s voice came through, singing “Lili Marlene”.

I stood still, spell-bound. It was such an undistinguished little tune, yet something in its nostalgic pathos touched a chord within me, and set it vibrating.

I forgot my mortal weariness. My thoughts ranged far over the Russian land, where Hitler’s soldiers ravaged and fought. But they had sung this song, and something of its humanity must have penetrated their hearts. They longed, as all men must do, for the warmth of love and home, and this melody was its perfect expression.

A terrible crash broke the delicate thread of fancy in which I was entangled. A bomb had exploded near my home, and I, who was always aware of the approaching danger, had not even heard its familiar strident buzz.

For a brief while, I had escaped the grim world on the wings of song. 

Isn’t it glorious that Britain, fighting for its life against Germany, nonetheless loved that German song, ‘Lili Marlene’? It’s saccharine and its words don’t seem to mean much, but it’s a haunting melody. Both sides cherished it.

Even more striking is that, for Yetta, the bombs are ‘Nazi’, but the men fighting in Russia are the slightly softer ‘Hitler’s soldiers’, and finally those who are moved by the song she sees as belonging to ‘all men’. Enemies they may have been, and armed ones at that, but Yetta recognised their essential humanity.

Leatrice (my mother), Nat (my grandfather) and Yetta
Behind them, the house where a few years later,
she would wait for the bombs to fall

Today, I wake up each morning with a sinking sense of the restrictions that are going back up again all around us. I think with regret of the freer life we seem to have lost. But Yetta’s words bring home to me the horror of living with a far worse fear, and all the time, a fear the keeps you awake at night and listening out nervously during the day, a fear of death or mutilation that can rain down on you from the sky at any moment.

We don’t have to live with that fear or anything one tenth as awful. As Salaudeen and Joseph tell us in their video, we have food and water and WiFi and Netflix. And unlike those of Yetta’s relatives who stayed in Lithuania, we don’t have the Gestapo or ruthless neighbours coming after us.

So let’s stop whingeing. We sometimes have to wear masks, and there are things we can’t do. Like Yetta, let’s learn to cope.

Perhaps we just need to find some appropriate songs to listen to.