Never Surrender

He was examining her, weighing her up. ‘I take a risk even in having you here. But it is a time when risk arrives with my breakfast and lingers on to tuck me in at night. We face a formidable opponent in Germany and its formidable armies. We also face Hitler.’ He began jabbing his chest with his finger. ‘I face Hitler. I, Winston Churchill. And yet I don’t know him. One of the few significant men in Europe I have never met.’ The room was dark except for the light of his desk lamp, yet she could see the exhaustion that hovered behind his eyes. ‘He refused to meet me, you know. In 1932 when I was motoring in Europe, inspecting the old battlefields. All the rest, Chamberlain, Halifax, Lloyd George, they met him. But not me. He simply refused. Mistook me for a man with no future, apparently.’

‘He may yet be right.’

‘Indeed he may,’ Churchill muttered, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘My father was a great English statesman, Frau Mueller. It’s partly due to him that you are here.’

‘But he’s … ?’

‘He gave me an excellent piece of advice. My father instructed me, never underestimate your enemy. Know your enemy if you want to beat him. Words of wisdom. So I was wondering … if you would be willing to help me thrash Hitler.’

‘Help? You?’

‘I am sure if an apology is owed for any misunderstandings we may have had in the past, it is freely offered on my part.’ For a man who had such an easy way with words, the apology sounded contrived to the point of insincerity.

‘You also owe me a week’s wages. You never paid.’

‘I … I …’ The old man began to splutter helplessly. This was leading nowhere. ‘Frau Mueller, you know Hitler better than any man in Britain. I need to understand him in order to crush him. I thought you might want to help in that enterprise, but if I am mistaken then I –’

‘You make it sound terribly personal.’

‘In some respects, it is.’

‘Hurt pride? Because he refused to meet you?’

‘It has nothing to do with pride!’

‘Then what are you fighting for? The British are fighting for no better reason than that you are too proud to admit that at almost every step of the way you got it wrong. Versailles. The Rhineland. Austria. Czechoslovakia –’

‘We are fighting for principle, not pride!’ he snapped, with an undertone of anger.

‘Poland? Poland’s not a principle, it’s a miserable afterthought from the last war that’s been pulled to pieces while you sat back and watched.’

He was beginning to breathe heavily, his teeth clamped fiercely around the butt of his cigar. ‘Well, now we are fighting because Hitler insists upon it, whether we like it or not. You said this was personal. It is. Both he and I have been recalled from obscurity to guide our nations through this hour. I am a Churchill, for all the strengths and faults which that has bred in me. Now I need to know what a Hitler is. And you can help me, if you will.’

‘You are a lot like him.’

‘Like That Man?’ He spat the words out, as though his face had been slapped.

‘Unruly, bad-tempered rabble-rousers, propagandists, nationalists, outsiders.’ She began ticking characteristics off on her fingers. ‘Why, you are both even painters – although in my view you show rather more talent than Hitler. And you both love war.’

‘I do not love war, as you put it.’ They both knew he was lying. ‘And perhaps I have made a mistake in thinking you could help –’

‘There is one difference which I think is very important, Mr Churchill.’

‘And what, pray, is that?’

‘I do not know you well, Mr Churchill, but I have my instincts. As a woman. And I believe you are capable of compassion – love, even. I see it in your eyes, in your words. But Hitler knows only one thing. Hatred. From his earliest days he was conditioned to hate – even to hate his father. Perhaps he hated his father most of all. He was an Austrian, a customs official on the Austro-German frontier, you see, and there is part of me which thinks that the Fuehrer’s first great coup, when he marched his army into Austria, was driven as much as anything by a desire to sweep away his father’s entire life work, to smash down his border posts and erase all traces of him. You think that ridiculous, of course, to suggest that the political ambitions of a man like Hitler could be driven by the memory of a long-dead father.’

Churchill paused before replying. ‘No, I do not think it ridiculous.’

‘Hitler has always needed someone to hate. When he was young it was his father, and now it is the Jews. Never forget how much he hates. But also never forget – never dare forget – Hitler’s extraordinary achievements. He took a nation as broken and decayed as Weimar Germany, where old women and babies starved to death in the streets, and he rebuilt it.’ Her mood had changed; it was no longer a lecture, her words carried growing passion. ‘While you English were clinging to your old ways, he built something new – not just the autobahns and barracks but a new people. He ripped out their sadness and restored their hope. He has raised them high and made them feel all but invincible. Germany is a land where no one starves any more. And what does it matter if a few Jews or Social Democrats don’t join in the general joy? What do a few cracked heads matter when an entire people who had been denied any sort of future have been lifted up and made proud once more? For the happiness of the whole, aren’t a few whispered sacrifices acceptable?’

He suspected she was goading him, but that was what he required, for his mind to be bent into focus.

‘So why did you not accept his bold new world?’

‘To my shame I did. For several years. I was one of those young mothers of Weimar who had starved like all the rest. Do you know how we survived in those years after the war, Mr Churchill, do you have any conception of what it was like? Once a month, every pay day, we hired a taxi to take us to the market – a taxi, not because we were rich but because every moment that passed could be measured in gold. With every breath we took, the money in our pockets grew more worthless, like butter on a hot stove. If we were lucky what had been worth a king’s ransom the previous week would now buy a few essentials, and if we weren’t lucky, if we were delayed, if the taxi was late, perhaps not even that. We stood in line, and prayed that by the time we reached the head of the queue there would still be something left, and that the price wouldn’t have shot out of sight even while we looked on. So in the end you stopped queuing and started pushing, and those that couldn’t push got trampled. We would spend everything we had, everything! Every last pfennig in our pockets. Then we would climb back into the taxi with whatever we had been able to buy and go home. Sometimes we might have meat, sometimes it would be off a cheese stall, other times just vegetables. But whatever it was would have to last us an entire month, until the next pay day, because we had nothing left. Nothing. All my jewellery gone, all our best clothes pawned. Can you understand that? I’m not talking about money for champagne but money for a little sugar and milk and bread.’ Her voice suddenly softened and began to break. ‘Nothing left for school. For medical bills. For heating in winter. And eventually, Mr Churchill, it wasn’t enough even for bread. One day I woke up and discovered I had no more milk for my baby. A week later she was dead.’

‘My heart breaks for you,’ he whispered.

‘No one starves under Hitler. And as long as we ate we gave thanks. We gave money when the Brown Shirts came round with their begging buckets, we gave salutes as their parades passed in the streets and we closed our ears to those noises in the night. When we woke up we might hear whispers that one neighbour or another had disappeared. It seemed a small price to pay for the food on our plates.’

‘So why did you eventually … ?’

She looked into her lap, her fingers running distractedly along the frayed edges of her cuffs.

‘If only I had a simple answer. There was a madness about our lives that infected us all. How mad can you get, driving into starvation in the back of a taxi? You know, Mr Churchill, in the whole of the last war when I was a young woman, I never heard a single shot fired. But under Weimar, shots were being fired all the time – at each other. Our leaders, our opponents, eventually even at the bread queues. Our streets became a battleground, our schools the headquarters. Children grew more used to the sound of gunfire than they were to their teachers’ voices. Instead of carrying around schoolbooks they began carrying around knives and hammers; their sports teams became nothing more than gangs of thugs. Can you imagine how much I and every other mother in the land begged for it to end? Then Hitler came along and made it all seem so simple. It was the fault of the Jews and the democrats. And we asked ourselves, what good was democracy if the water didn’t run and the lamps went dark? Better that we see by the light of burning torches. Our political leaders had been so weak, so false, but Hitler seemed above all that. Different. Exciting. Almost – what is the word? – spiritual.’

‘And we had Stanley Baldwin,’ Churchill muttered in contempt. ‘So tell me, pray, why you put it all behind you. Why did you choose to resist when so many went along with it?’

‘It crept up on you so slowly, what was really happening. Made it so easy to accept. Of course, there were those that had to be punished, the guilty men. The Marxists, the Social Democrats, the Jews. They almost seemed to prove their guilt when so many of them were shot trying to escape. But slowly it crept closer to us all. Everyone became a suspect. We had to give up our friends, our lovers, our beliefs – even renounce Belief itself. You could trust no one. And suddenly there was no private life at all, no space even to think.’ Her head fell to hide the pain. ‘After my baby died I went back to work – as a teacher in the Grundschule, the primary school, where my other child, my son, was a pupil. One day I was supervising in the library when the Brown Shirts came in. Very polite, apologized for the disturbance. But they had come for the Jews, they announced, and started leading the Jewish children out, one by one. I asked what the children had done, and the Brown Shirt leader just looked at me curiously. “Done? They are Jews.” But they were my pupils, my son’s classmates, my Jews, and I demanded to know why they were being taken. The Brown Shirt’s attitude changed; a rage came over his face. “Are you a Jew?” he asked. And I almost fell over in my rush to deny the charge – of course I wasn’t a Jew. I was furious with him, how dare he accuse … ?’

She was silent for a moment, needing to recover herself. When her head came up once more the eyes were filled with tears. ‘After he had gone I realized what had already become of me. I watched as they dragged them all away. I looked at the empty spaces in the library, the schoolbooks still open on the tables, the satchels on the backs of the chairs, and wondered when the Brown Shirts would be coming back for more.’ She leant forward, bent with feeling. ‘No, I can’t pretend I saw it all at that moment, that I became an opponent. I am not a hero, Mr Churchill, and I had no idea where they were taking them. But I knew the Brown Shirts would be back, and eventually they would come for my son, and either he would join them, or be taken by them. This was the new Germany, my son’s Germany, and I wanted to find out more about the man who had made it. That is when I started reading about Hitler, talking about him, studying him. In the end I decided to write about him. A biography.’

‘You were seeking to know your enemy …’

‘My enemy?’ She shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t my enemy, not at first. The book wasn’t intended to be an attack upon him, I was doing no more than trying to understand. So I started asking questions about him, but that meant that very soon they began asking questions about me. I had become their enemy without my realizing it.’

‘I am so sorry.’

But she had no desire for his pity. Already she had shared with him far more than she had intended. Once again her life was being invaded. It was time to push him back. ‘Did your father know his enemies?’

‘No, I think not,’ Churchill replied, startled at the sudden change of subject. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because I’ve noticed that when you talk about him you seem … stiff. Formal. Almost anxious.’

‘I loved my father.’

‘No. You were afraid of him, I think.’

Churchill bridled. ‘My whole life has been dedicated to his memory.’

‘Dominated by his memory, perhaps. A bit like Hitler.’

His hand slapped down on the desktop to demand her silence. It landed with such force that the toothpicks jumped in their pot. ‘I asked you here to talk about the Fuehrer, not to offer crass remarks about my father, a man whom you never met.’

‘I’ve never met Hitler.’

And they were back where they had always been.