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Remembering the blitz: was it an avoidable tragedy? Hitler unleashed the blitz on Britain on 7 September 1940. But could more have been done to lessen the destruction and bloodshed that followed?
Just after 4.30pm on Saturday, 7 September 1940, 364 German bombers and 515 fighters flew across the Channel and followed the Thames estuary to London, using the fires caused by their bombs as markers. They came for a further 75 consecutive nights (except for one that was too cloudy for the bombers to operate). The blitz would last until 16 May 1941 – when most of the Luftwaffe was reassigned to the invasion of Russia. In 1940, 13,000 people were killed in London alone. Attacks on other major cities throughout the UK began on 15 October 1940, with the centre of Coventry being destroyed on the night of 14/15 November.
The idea was to force Britain to seek peace: German bombs would destroy its industry, transport and communications links around major cities, and so terrify the civilian population that they would force their government to sue for peace. Hitler knew it would take time, but London's four million inhabitants, its packed and inflammable warehouses, its maze of narrow streets and teeming slums, were ripe for terror tactics.
And terror there certainly was. Men old enough to have fought in the first world war said the western front had offered nothing worse than they saw on the first night of the blitz. The next day, most of London's firefighters were convinced they would not live for more than another week.
Acts of bravery abounded among the terrible onslaught; yet, when postwar prime minister Clement Attlee would later demand sacrifice from his people, he appealed to "the Dunkirk spirit", not "the blitz spirit" – perhaps because, if you were at Dunkirk, you were part of a self-electing group doing brave things. Everyone was in on the blitz: the brave and the not-so-brave, the honest and the dishonest, and those, like most of us, who are a little of both. Maybe this explains why it has taken so long for Britain to mark properly the events of 70 years ago.
We think of it as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters.
Britain was ill-equipped to defend its cities. The underpowered searchlights were usually ineffective against aircraft at altitudes above 12,000ft. During the first raid, only 92 anti-aircraft guns were available to defend London, though within five days there were twice as many, with orders to fire at will. This boosted civilian morale and encouraged bomber crews to drop before they were over their target, though it had little physical effect.
The blitz did not provide a respite from human greed, bureaucratic idiocy and official meanness. "Don't talk to me about everyone pulling together," says David Clark, who was a little boy when his home in Ilford suffered a direct hit. The family was safe in its Anderson shelter, "but the neighbours and the ARP [Air Raid Precautions wardens] assumed we were dead and looted the house. They didn't get the fish knives or the port decanter and I still have those."
Such stories do not form part of our collective memory of the war. As Angus Calder writes in The Myth of the Blitz, "Successful after-raid looters have not written their memoirs. Cowardly people in local government have not advertised their shame." It is true that brave cockneys shouted to Winston Churchill, "We can take it!" – but the full story of that day, as told in Juliet Gardiner's fine new book The Blitz, is one of dreadful and avoidable tragedy. A bomb crashed through a ventilation shaft into a shelter containing more than 1,000 people. Churchill visited the scene while parents were still turning over their dead children: "It was good of you to come, Winnie. We thought you'd come. We can take it. Give it back." An old woman said: "You see, he really cares, he's crying."
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes".
Tens of thousands of civilians were forced to sleep far from their homes – in parked cars, taxis and buses; in churches and barns; even out in the open, on Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park – and walked, cycled or took buses into work every day (it was called "trekking"). But once again, the way some of these homeless casualties of the blitz were received punctures the idea of everyone being "in it together". Baldock in Hertfordshire, for example, was known to be unwelcoming, while Windsor would not accept "Jews or children". The prejudice of the burghers of Windsor was echoed both lower down and higher up in the social scale: the military engineered the dismissal of the Jewish secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, on thinly disguised antisemitic grounds.
In 1941, RAF Bomber Command asked the fire chiefs: "What change of tactics by the Luftwaffe would cause you most concern?" Firefighters said the concentration of a heavy attack into a very short space of time could swamp fire service resources. And so, when 1,000 RAF bombers attacked Cologne in May 1942, 1,500 tonnes of high explosive were dropped on the city in the space of an hour and a half, and fire services were overwhelmed. The allies won the war partly because we ran a more effective blitz than Hitler.
Oberammergau Passion Play is a changing tradition
Reporting from Oberammergau, Germany —
After 376 years, the Oberammergau Passion Play is still a work in progress. Performed every decade as a promise to God, it now confronts its own controversial history as much as it explores its reason for being.
At an outdoor theater large enough to hold nearly the entire population of this small Bavarian village, a capacity audience of 4,700 watches Andreas Richter as Jesus angrily confront money-changers and merchants in the Temple of Solomon. The 130-foot-wide performance space is packed with hundreds of local performers playing the merchants, Jesus' disciples and followers, curious townspeople, angry members of the Jerusalem priesthood and Roman soldiers, plus assorted livestock.
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"Is this God's house or is it a marketplace?" Richter asks in German, smashing a large terra cotta pot and then overturning a cage to send a flock of doves flying into the afternoon sky. Many of his words and actions are traditional in Oberammergau, familiar and expected for centuries — but not what happens next.
Covering his head with a shawl, Richter holds high the sacred scrolls of the Torah and leads everyone except the Romans in a fervent Jewish prayer — in Hebrew. More Hebrew, and a Menorah, turn up later in the Last Supper scene, which sets New Testament events in the context of a solemn Passover ritual.
Former inmate recalls daring, romantic escape from Auschwitz - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
With every step toward the gate, Jerzy Bielecki was certain he would be shot.
Jerzy Bielecki holding photos of him in 1944 and his sweetheart Cyla Cybulska in 1945 at his home in southern Poland
Photo by: AP
The day was July 21, 1944. Bielecki was walking in broad daylight down a pathway at Auschwitz, wearing a stolen SS uniform with his Jewish sweetheart Cyla Cybulska by his side.
His knees buckling with fear, he tried to keep a stern bearing on the long stretch of gravel to the sentry post.
The German guard frowned at his forged pass and eyed the two for a period that seemed like an eternity - then uttered the miraculous words: Ja, danke - yes, thank you - and let Jerzy and Cyla out of the death camp and into freedom.
It was a common saying among Auschwitz inmates that the only way out was through the crematorium chimneys. These were among the few ever to escape through the side door.
The 23-year-old Bielecki used his relatively privileged position as a German-speaking Catholic Pole to orchestrate the daring rescue of his Jewish girlfriend who was doomed to die.
It was great love, Bielecki, now 89, recalled in an interview at his home in this small southern town 55 miles (85 kilometers) from Auschwitz.
We were making plans that we would get married and would live together forever.
Bielecki was 19 when the Germans seized him on the false suspicion he was a resistance fighter, and brought to the camp in April 1940 in the first transport of inmates, all Poles.
He was given number 243 and was sent to work in warehouses, where occasional access to additional food offered some chance of survival.
It was two years before the first mass transports of Jews started arriving in
1942. Most of the Jews were taken straight to the gas chambers of neighboring Birkenau, while a few were designated to be forced laborers amid horrific conditions, allowing them to postpone death.
In September 1943 Bielecki was assigned to a grain storage warehouse. Another inmate was showing him around when suddenly a door opened and a group of girls walked in.
It seemed to me that one of them, a pretty dark-haired one, winked at me, Bielecki said with a broad smile as he recalled the scene. It was Cyla - who had just been assigned to repair grain sacks.
Their friendship grew into love, as the warehouse offered brief chances for more face-to-face meetings.
In a report she wrote for the Auschwitz memorial in 1983, Cybulska recalled that during the meetings they told each other their life stories and every meeting was a truly important event for both of us.
Cybulska, her parents, two brothers and a younger sister were rounded up in January 1943 in the Lomza ghetto in northern Poland and taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her parents and sister were immediately killed in the gas chambers, but she and her brothers were sent to work.
By September, 22-year-old Cybulska was the only one left alive, with inmate number 29558 tattooed on her left forearm.
As their love blossomed, Bielecki began working on the daring plan for escape.
From a fellow Polish inmate working at a uniform warehouse he secretly got a complete SS uniform and a pass. Using an eraser and a pencil, he changed the officer's name in the pass from Rottenfuehrer Helmut Stehler to Steiner just in case the guard knew the real Stehler, and filled it in to say an inmate was being led out of the camp for police interrogation at a nearby station. He secured some food, a razor for himself and a sweater and boots for Cybulska.
He briefed her on his plan: "Tomorrow an SS-man will come to take you for an interrogation. The SS-man will be me."
The next afternoon, Bielecki, dressed in the stolen uniform, came to the laundry barrack where Cybulska had been moved for work duty. Sweating with fear, he demanded the German supervisor release the woman.
Bielecki led her out of the barrack and onto a long path leading to a side gate guarded by the sleepy SS-man who let them go through.
The fear of being gunned down remained with him in his first steps of freedom: "I felt pain in my backbone, where I was expecting to be shot," Bielecki said.
But when he eventually looked back, the guard was in his booth. They walked on to a road, then into fields where they hid in dense bushes until dark, when they started to march.
"Marching across fields and woods was very exhausting, especially for me, not used to such intensive walks," Cybulska said in her report to Auschwitz as quoted in a Polish-language book Bielecki has written, He Who Saves One Life ...
"Far from any settlements, we had to cross rivers," she wrote. "When water was high ... Jurek carried me to the other side."
At one point she was too tired to walk and asked him to leave her.
"Jurek did not want to hear that and kept repeating: 'we fled together and will walk on together,'" she reported, referring to Jerzy by his Polish diminutive.
For nine nights they moved under the cover of darkness toward Bielecki's uncle's home in a village not far from Krakow.
His mother, who was living at the house, was overjoyed to see him alive, though wasted-away after four years at Auschwitz. A devout Catholic, however, she was dead-set against him marrying a Jewish girl.
"How will you live? How will you raise your children?" Bielecki recalls her asking.
To keep her away from possible Nazi patrols, Cybulska was hidden on a nearby farm. Bielecki decided to go into hiding in Krakow - a fateful choice they believed would improve their chances of avoiding capture by the Nazis. The couple spent their last night together under a pear tree in an orchard, saying their goodbyes and making plans to meet right after the war.
After the Soviet army rolled through Krakow in January 1945, Bielecki left the city where he had been hiding from Nazi pursuit and walked 25-miles (40-kilometers) along snow-covered roads to meet Cybulska at the farmhouse.
But he was four days too late.
Cybulska, not aware that the area where she had been hiding had been liberated three weeks before Krakow, gave up waiting for him, concluding her Juracek either was dead or had abandoned their plans.
She got on a train to Warsaw, planning to find an uncle in the United States. On the train she met a Jewish man, David Zacharowitz, and the two began a relationship and eventually married. They headed to Sweden, then to Cybulska's uncle in New York, who helped them start a jewelry business. Zacharowitz died in 1975.
In Poland, Bielecki eventually started a family of his own and worked as the director of a school for car mechanics. He had no news of Cybulska and had no way of finding her.
In her report Cybulska said that she was haunted in the years after she left Poland by a wish to see her hometown and to find Jurek, if he was alive.
Sheer chance made her wish come true.
While talking to her Polish cleaning woman in 1982, Cybulska related her Auschwitz escape story.
The woman was stunned.
"I know the story, I saw a man on Polish TV saying he had led his Jewish girlfriend out of Auschwitz," the cleaning lady told Cybulska, according to Bielecki.
She tracked down his phone number and one early morning in May 1983 the telephone rang in Bielecki's apartment in Nowy Targ.
"I heard someone laughing - or crying - on the phone and then a female voice said 'Juracku, this is me, your little Cyla,'" Bielecki recalls.
A few weeks later they met at Krakow airport. He brought 39 red roses, one for each year they spent apart. She visited him in Poland many times, and they jointly visited the Auschwitz memorial, the farmer family that hid her and many other places, staying together in hotels.
"The love started to come back," Bielecki said.
"Cyla was telling me: 'leave your wife, come with me to America,'" he recalls. "She cried a lot when I told her: 'Look, I have such fine children, I have a son, how could I do that?'"
She returned to New York and wrote to him: "Jurek I will not come again," Bielecki recalled.
They never met again and she did not reply to his letters.
Cybulska died a few years later in New York in 2002.
In 1985, the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem awarded Bielecki the Righteous Among the Nations title for saving Cybulska. The institute's website account of the escape and its aftermath is consistent with Bielecki's account to The Associated Press.
"I was very much in love with Cyla, very much," Bielecki said. "Sometimes I cried after the war, that she was not with me. I dreamed of her at night and woke up crying."
Fate decided for us, but I would do the same again.
