Page 89 of The Gathering Storm (Morland Dynasty #36)

Basil felt numb. He didn’t understand how people could do such things.

Why the Jews? What need did this hatred fill?

What was this sump of darkness that existed in men’s hearts?

He felt he had aged years in one night. And he sensed the beginning of a clear path ahead of him.

He wasn’t sure where it led, but felt he would know when he saw it. It was Duty.

Rosco said, towards dawn, when Basil, passing his desk, accidentally caught his eye: ‘This is not the end.’

Richard and Cynthia had been at the Nevinsons’ for supper when Leah, who had been listening to the wireless in the kitchen, came in, pale and shocked, to tell them to listen.

As the first reports were given by clipped, neutral BBC voices, supper was forgotten, and they gathered round the set in grim silence.

Samuel sat slumped in his big armchair; Hannah leaned on the back as if her legs would not properly support her; Leah stood by the door, constantly wringing her hands in her apron.

Richard and Cynthia stood together, and her hand crept into his.

When the bulletin ended, Samuel leaned forward between his knees as if he was going to be sick. He put his hands over his face and rubbed; Hannah patted helplessly at his shoulder. When he emerged, he said only, as if to no-one in particular, ‘It begins.’

Richard and Cynthia did not go home that night. Leah and Hannah made up a bed for them. They talked quietly in bed for a long time.

‘I don’t know how Papa will stand this,’ Cynthia said. Richard held her close in his arms, so her mouth was by his ear. She felt very cold to him, and he tried to put warmth into her with his body. ‘He hasn’t recovered from what happened two weeks ago. And now this …’

On the 28th of October, some twelve thousand Polish Jews had been expelled from Germany, ordered without notice from their homes in the night, told they could take with them just one suitcase each.

What they left behind, reports said, was looted by their neighbours, once any valuables had been seized by the Nazi authorities.

They were marched to railway stations and put on trains to the Polish border.

But the Polish government had said that Polish Jews who had lived abroad for five years were no longer citizens.

The border guards refused to admit them and sent them back to the German side.

So for days in the pouring rain they were stateless, unwanted, trapped at the border, without food or shelter.

One British newspaper reported that they were ‘lying about, penniless and deserted, in little villages along the frontier near where they had been driven out by the Gestapo and left’.

Four thousand were finally admitted, but the rest were sent to refugee camps, where conditions were so grim that, according to a report, some in desperation tried to escape back into Germany and were shot by frontier guards.

‘Stateless,’ Cynthia said. ‘Nowhere to go. No-one wants them. It could be us next.’

‘No, never,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t happen in this country.’

‘You don’t know, you don’t know,’ she cried softly. ‘Why do they hate us? What’s going to happen to my baby? Condemned before he’s even born to be hated and cast out.’

‘He’s my baby too,’ Richard said. ‘He will never be stateless.’

But she was in the grip of an ancient grief, older than her by centuries, and she rocked against him and moaned softly, as Jewish women had rocked and moaned under the black pall of persecution throughout history. He held her close and murmured to her, and kissed her head helplessly.

When she was quiet, finally, he said, ‘Do you want to go away? Would you feel safer in America? I can arrange it, if you want.’

‘Papa said—’ she began, muffled by his neck.

‘I know about your running-away bag,’ he said gently. ‘He told me, if things go bad, I must get you away. All of you,’ he added, in case she objected to leaving them. ‘But if you want, we can go now. It will only take a few days to arrange—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Papa wouldn’t go, not yet anyway.

And he’s not well, and Mama wouldn’t go without him.

’ She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him, determination in her face, though her chin quivered.

Her courage made him want to cry. ‘I’m staying.

I want to stay with you. We’ll – we’ll face what we have to together. ’

‘I will always take care of you,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

‘I know,’ she said.

The pogrom was called afterwards the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht in German, because of all the broken glass from Jewish windows that paved the streets and glittered in the streetlights.

The German government ordered Jews to sweep it all up.

They further imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmarks for the murder of vom Rath, which they levied by confiscating 20 per cent of all Jewish property.

And they diverted six million Reichsmarks of insurance money, which would have been paid to Jews for the destruction of their property on Kristallnacht, to the government’s coffers.

This, they said, was ‘damages due to the German Nation’.

It emerged in reports that Hitler had approved the pogrom, ordering officials not to intervene, and while that was shocking, it was not any more surprising.

It could be seen that since 1933 the Nazi government’s intention had been to get all the Jews to quit Germany, leaving their wealth behind.

But after Kristallnacht, it came to be feared that something more sinister was behind the relentless persecution.

On the day after, Hermann Goring said at a news conference, ‘The Jewish problem will reach its solution if, in any time soon, we will be drawn into war beyond our border – then it is obvious that we will have to manage a final account with the Jews.’

‘You see,’ Cynthia said to Richard, ‘we are not people, like you. We are a problem.’

They were in the office, and Samuel had not come in that morning – Hannah rang to say that he was feeling very tired and she had insisted he stayed at home and rested.

Later that day there was another phone call, from Leah this time – very nervous about using the telephone and under the impression she had to shout because they were a long way away.

She said the master had collapsed, and as he was unconscious, the mistress had called for an ambulance, using the new ‘999’ service, and he had been taken away to hospital.

Patient questioning by Richard elicited that he was at St Stephen’s in Fulham Road.

He and Cynthia got their coats and hats and went outside to hail a taxi.

Samuel did not regain consciousness, and died two days later, after a second stroke. He was, Richard thought, though he never said it aloud, one more victim of the pogrom.

Lennie had gone. Polly missed him, but once she had received his wire from New York saying he had arrived safely, she felt calm and hopeful.

She had plenty to do, including the arranging of a wedding, though she decided not to put any specific orders in place yet, from a superstitious fear that it would be tempting Fate.

In any case, he had said three months, but that did not give her an actual date to work towards.

She decided to wait until Christmas. He might have a better idea then of how much longer he needed.

Three months would have him arriving back in England in February, when the weather was likely to be hard.

March, or even April, would be better for a wedding.

She had waited all this time, she could wait a little longer.

In all their talk together about being married, he had always taken it for granted that they would live at Morland Place.

She remembered the very first man to propose to her, back when she was a foolish girl, and his assumption that she would live with him in London – far from her home, and not even in the country.

No horses and dogs, no wide spaces to roam over.

When she had queried that, he had proposed that at some point they might have a country house in Surrey.

Surrey! But Lennie had understood. It had never been in question.

She was Morland Place and Morland Place was her.

How could it have taken her so long to see that he was the only man she could happily marry?

Meanwhile, she kept busy. There were many visits of congratulation after the engagement was announced in the papers, with commiseration that her betrothed had had to go away.

She held a dinner for the family and favoured guests, and out of kindness to Ethel, who seemed a bit miffed for reasons Polly couldn’t guess – had she wanted Polly to remain a widow like her?

Did she fear being thrown out after the wedding and made to go and live with Jeremy and Amelia?

– she asked Jeremy to act as host. He seemed as much nervous as pleased, but in the event he did it very well, and she was impressed by his gain in maturity since he had married.

During the mingling part of the evening, he came up to Polly quietly and told her that Amelia was expecting, which perhaps explained it: assistant manager of his branch, a married man, and now about to become a father.

He said he had wanted her to know, but didn’t want to steal her thunder by announcing it generally at her party.

Polly thanked him, was touched, and when they got to the toasting part of the evening, and she had to stand up and reply, she announced it herself.

Jeremy looked startled and pleased, Amelia blushed fierily, and Ethel burst into tears.

It was a happy evening – as Polly told Lennie in a long letter.