Voices from the Silent Front

Liz could not say where she was now based, and TJ wouldn’t ask, but it was clearly not far from London, as she would be able to come to the capital every weekend.

‘Well, I guess we’ll see if we like each other?’, said TJ as they walked through Hyde Park. Liz pulled her arm from his and stopped walking.

He took a couple more steps thinking he had said something funny, but on turning to see Liz, he realised that she was upset. She was standing with her arms by her side, looking at him as if waving goodbye.

‘What?’, said TJ, feeling defensive.

She didn’t respond straightaway, her eyes focused on his face, her mouth forming a question.

‘TJ, what is your real name?’, said Liz finally.

That was against the rules, he could have blocked it. Some deeply buried voice was telling him ‘no’, but this was Liz.

‘John. Well, Thomas John… Thomas John Maclean. Back home I go by John.’

‘Elizabeth Braithwaite, everyone calls me Liz. How do you do?’ No smile, Liz wasn’t angry, she was frightened.

‘Liz, I was just joking…’

‘It wasn’t funny. Would I love you if there was no war? Would you love me?’ She was building up steam, she could see things she couldn’t begin to describe, but they were in the space between John and Liz. Her voice was trembling, her hands turning to fists, ‘ I’m not me. Who you are looking at is not Elizabeth Braithwaite, it’s Liz, it’s…’

‘Yes.’ TJ cut in. ‘Yes, I would. Yes, I do. Yes, I will.’ Enunciating every word, eye to eye, slowly walking back towards her, reaching for her arms. ‘The answer is “yes”, you are a version of Liz and I am a version of John.’ Holding her arms, never leaving her eyes. ‘The universe put us together and we didn’t bounce off. Doesn’t matter that there’s a war on, there’s always something. If there was no war, it would be a different version of you and me… probably… but we would stick, land on each other and stick.’

In the distance, a wiry figure carefully climbed onto a wooden crate on which something was scrawled, too far away to read. The man stood up, coughed, lifted his shoulders, padded down his crumpled suit and started to shout out his argument.

This was what John and Liz had come to see, they were heading towards Speaker’s Corner on Sunday morning, the favourite place and time for people to stand up and say whatever they wanted to say.

Liz relaxed in John’s hands, the panic had moved on; perhaps the cause was still there but the interruption pushed both of them back into their bubble as they closed in on the speaker.

‘My friends. I am here today to ask for your help.’ A wizened, walnut-faced man dressed in an old suit, trilby hat, and worn but polished shoes. Yellow fingers stabbing at the sky.

‘I am a Jew.’ He looked around at the paltry crowd assembling in front of him.

‘The Jews again,’ thought TJ, remembering the guests of the Spaiders, the refugees. He didn’t know any living Jews, this would be the first one he’d knowingly encountered. Liz wanted to see what other speakers might be saying, but TJ begged her wait for some moments as he wanted to hear from this man.

‘I find it hard to stand here, I struggle to find the words…’, his eyes were sunk in his head, folds of flesh pushing down on them, his mouth quivering, but his voice strong.

‘Are there any other Jews here? Gentile or Jew? Gentile or Jew?’, he looked across those gathering as did his audience. He was indeed the only Jew.

Pulling a grey handkerchief from his jacket pocket, he dabbing his eyes before pulling it across his forehead.

‘I have worked here, in London, since 1896. A tailor I am. Beautiful suits… and ladies dresses, ah…’ he almost smiled but then caught himself. ‘I came here as a tsenerling—a boy of 16. We had escaped. My mother and father pretended to be Austrian and the Russian soldiers couldn’t tell the difference between German and nonsense.’

He put both hands on his chest. ‘Me? I pretended to be insane. My father said I was very good at it.’

The speaker smiled and the growing crowd laughed. But then the smile disappeared, and the handkerchief appeared again. His index finger at the sky.

‘We were the only ones….the only ones from our village that managed to get away. Everyone else was murdered by the Russians. Why? Why?’ His voice sounded like that of a passing seagull as he asked the question.

‘They wanted the land. It wasn’t our land, it wasn’t anyone’s land, but we were there – and we had been there, looking after that land, for generations.’

‘But you know we didn’t lose everyone, the brothers and sisters of my parents, and their families, travelled in all kinds of ways towards the West. My mother got a postcard from her sister Devorah to say that they had settled in Gdansk. My father from his sister Adah with her husband in Bayreuth in Bavaria, a young one on the way, mazel tov.’ He was pointing at spaces in front of him as he listed them all.

‘Esther and her five children in Berlin, one had died during the journey, she never said why.’

He licked his lips, ‘Rafael, my mother’s brother got to Frankfurt, and after the postcard we didn’t hear from him for twenty years. But he did well, he made a good living, built a nice business as a carpenter, big family. They came to see us in 1925, what a time it was.’

The crowd smiled as one. The man spoke in a low voice, forcing his audience to remain silent to hear him. There was something mesmerising in his manner, TJ and Liz had to keep moving forward as more came to listen.

‘Oi, what a joy it was to know that our family was so large, our relatives had done so well…’ He looked around, and held out his handkerchief gripped in both hands. His face suddenly changed full of anger. ‘...from rags,’ he roared, unchecked tears streaming down his face.

He pulled his free, trembling hand back to his face, his long skeletal fingers curling around the edge of his mouth.

Then he reached out to the space in front of the audience, ‘In 1932, there were nearly two hundred of us across Poland and Germany. Before it became difficult, we would have relatives come stay with us, och, nearly every month. My dear wife, before God took her, she would be baking every day, and you know there would always be someone arrive to eat. Wonderful.’

Liz tightened her grip on John’s arm, everything told them the story was not going to end well.

‘We got letters when the visits stopped; photographs of new ones, news of old ones, sad news, but good news too of marriages and such things. And then you know, a funny thing started to happen… Gentile or Jew? Gentile or Jew?’, it wasn’t ‘funny’, he spoke the word with bitterness, his face tight.

‘The letters…the envelopes, they had been opened,’ he was nodding his head at the audience, horrified at the thought. ‘They were reading our letters. I don’t know who they were. I mean they were German I suppose, but who, who does that? Who takes someone’s letter, and opens it…and reads it?’ His voice filled with anger, he licked his lips.

John knew people who opened letters and read their contents; they had pretty ankles.

The tailor’s hand was now wagging a finger as he took a gulp of air, ‘Our letters were not just read. Whole sections were blacked out,’ both hands opened out to the crowd, ‘Those beautiful words telling us wonderful things, they were destroyed. Often we would know little more than they were alive when writing. And what they could read from us….Ach’, he waved a hand away in disgust.

The Jew scanned his audience, ‘Who here has a brother or sister or perhaps a cousin with them today, or maybe a man and woman who love each other and spend long times apart?’

Some hands went up, but John and Liz remained motionless, anonymous.

‘Imagine that everything you could say to each other would be read first by a stranger who may even decide that you may not read all… any…any…any of what is written.’ The Jew was roaring at his crowd, incandescent with rage. And then he withdrew, weakened by the energy he was expelling, folding back on himself. The handkerchief patting the side of his head.

He looked straight into John’s eyes.

‘And then…nothing.’

The man was barely able to keep going, the emotion in his voice almost overpowering it, ‘We would write saying please come to us, get to us, just leave where you are, leave everything and come to us, but ach…I am sure they never saw those letters. Well even if they did…all I know is that they have gone.’

Silence.

Tears streaming down Liz’s face.

A member of the crowd asked, ‘What do you mean gone? Gone where?’

The exhausted tailor looked up, tears in his eyes, his mouth quivering, his open arms rising with his shoulders, ‘Gone, dead. All dead. The Germans have been collecting all the Jews in Europe and killing them. They are loading my people on trains. No, not trains, as if I say trains you think of Victoria and Kings Cross. No, these are wagons for animals, hundreds in each wagon…hundreds of people,’ his hands pointing at people in front of him, ‘crushed together, children lost at their feet, no-one able to move.’

People in the audience were shaking their heads.

‘The trains tra….’

A woman in the crowd shouted to him, ‘How do you know this? You are not getting any letters? You don’t know this. You are making it all up.’

The tailor shook his head, understanding the woman’s disbelief. ‘No my dear, if only that could be true. My family did not escape.’ He took a large breath, and then continued, ‘But others did get away. Very few. Miracles in each case. Overlooked, or hidden away, or pretending to be German, or even rescued by brave liberators, resistance fighters. Just a trickle, but witnesses to the truth. We have pictures, my friends, I have received some of those who have carried these messages in my own home, and they have seen things that cannot be described, will never be believed.’

He licked his lips. His audience were restless, anxious.

Many in the audience would listen on the wireless to the battles in North Africa, and the actions of the genius of the German command, General Rommel. Many across Britain, if asked, ‘who led the opposing forces in Algeria and Libya?’, could give Rommel for the Germans but would struggle to name the British equivalent. How could it be possible that a race so close in looks and values to the British could be capable of such barbarity. Yes, they were at war, but these were civilised countries, there were rules of behaviour. No, the tailor told a compelling story, but that’s all it was, a story.

A man shouted, ‘So how many people are you talking about, hundreds, thousands?’ His voice exposed his disbelief.

The tailor could feel that his moment was over, but he raised himself up to his full height to reply, his eyes staring wildly out to the horizon. He shouted the answer for all he was worth, ‘Millions.’

The crowd were already leaving, some quiet, some shaking their heads, some shouting to the old man to go back to his beer.

Liz was trembling through her tears, scarcely holding back sobs. John was supporting her partly to hide his own tears, but he looked up to the old man now contemplating getting down from his box and nodded his head. ‘We believe you.’

The old man smiled as if to say it didn’t matter, and then picked up the card from the front of his crate. The card had one word handwritten across it; ‘Shalom.’