Abstract
This edited collection resulted from a call by two historians, Robin Healy and Gearoid Barry, who asked their colleagues at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway to contribute accounts about their family’s experiences during World War II. The 14 chapters that make up Family Histories and World War II: Survivors and Descendants underscore the tremendous human cost of the conflict, especially for the most vulnerable, civilians and prisoners of war. The stories in this anthology are gripping and include accounts of an Italian family sheltering a downed American aviator from the enemy in a small Italian mountainside village, the price paid by civilians who resisted German occupiers in Greece and Italy, the harrowing tale of survival of two sisters and their mother during the siege of Leningrad, and the travails of Ukrainians sent to Germany as forced laborers. The collection considers the story of three Irish citizens who served with the British armed forces during the war and offers accounts of two German soldiers, one who survived the conflict and another who did not.
One of the strengths of this collection is the engagement of several of the authors with questions of evidence, memory, and history. Some who lived through the war deliberately sought to preserve their stories for future generations. Marcello Consigliere, an Italian army officer, kept a secret diary while spending the final years of the war in several German concentration camps for refusing to support Germany after the Italian government signed an armistice with the Western Allies in 1943. In the 1970s, Marcello transcribed the diary and had it bound, turning it into a family heirloom. Olinta Dal Lago frequently told his stories about being the youngest son in a family of resistance fighters in rural Italian village and his harrowing brushes with death, especially when concealing weapons from the Germans. Olinta eventually wrote a memoir, Resistance Told to the Children, 1943–45, for his granddaughter; later, his sister edited and arranged for it be published where it even found its way into local schools. Enrico Dal Lago’s account of his father’s war-time experience is among the best of the collection for placing his father’s experiences in a wider historiographical context and also engaging in the meaning of the Resistance in postwar Italian society.
Throughout her life, Irina Ruppo grew up listening to her maternal and paternal grandmother’s stories about their life in Leningrad and the impact of the German siege. But near the end of her life, one grandmother, Raisa Kazachkova decided to write them down and distributed her typed memoirs to family members. In her analysis, Irina offers insights regarding what her grandmother’s recollections say about Jewish identity in a society that officially embraced atheism but also discriminated against Jews. But Irina also examines what the memoirs do not say as well as the inconsistencies in memory over time. The omissions are significant and serve as an “indictment against a Soviet regime which not only failed to safeguard its citizens against one of the worst disasters in the twentieth century, but which prevented them, through the culture of fear and silence, from fully voicing and understanding their own experiences” (182).
The war both hastened and delayed marriages. The vagrancies of war turned the courtship of two Irish natives, Cecil McCall, who served as a RAF pilot, and Patricia Fox into a five-year affair conducted much of the time through correspondence. Cecil who became a widower never told much of his war-time experience to his family, but fortunately his and his wife’s war-time correspondence survived. Cecil’s training sent him to southern Africa, and he eventually flew combat mission in North Africa and the Mediterranean Theater. In 1942, Patricia joined the American Ambulance Great Britain (AAGB) in Aberdeen, Scotland to support the fight against Nazism. Even after being shot down over Yugoslavia and becoming a prisoner of war, the correspondence between Cecil and Patricia continued. After V-E Day, the couple married, and they eventually returned to Ireland.
Many of the contributors rely heavily on oral recollections and within the same family there can be those willing to share their memories while others remain silent. Ciara Boylan recounted the range of documentation she was able to consult regarding the service of her grandfather, Jimmy McNamara, who served a as dentist with the British army from 1937 through the end of the war. She drew on official records that survived along with personal letters her grandfather wrote to her grandmother. But like many veterans, Jimmy seldom spoke about the war. For understandable reasons, he was especially reluctant to discuss his role as a dentist tasked with identifying the victims from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and helping document war crimes committed there.
Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa’s mother often talked about how German defeat resulted in the occupation by the Soviet army of her town in Sudetenland. While the Soviet army officers who commandeered her home did not mistreat her family, a young girl who lived next door would not be as fortunate. She was raped. His mother spoke of the struggle for survival after her family was expelled by Czechoslovakian authorities because of their ethnicity and forced to flee to Germany. Growing up, Hans-Walter was constantly reminded to finish everything on his plate at mealtime because of her mother’s experiences of not having enough to eat as a child. In contrast, Hans-Walter’s father was another veteran who said little about the war and his deployment with the Wehrmacht in Finland and later Norway. After the war ended, his father spent three years in captivity serving as a farm laborer in France. Surviving war-time letters indicate that his father embraced Nazi ideology during the war, and after 1945 he supported far-right political parties in German elections. Despite his ultra-rightist views, his father supported Hans-Walter’s decision to seek conscientious objector status and avoid compulsory military service in the West German army in 1976. Drawing on family recollections, Hans-Walter’s maternal grandfather, Hans Zenker had fully embraced Nazi ideology and remained unrepentant in the postwar years. Zenker berated his grandson for avoiding military service declaring him a “Traitor to the Fatherland” and accepted no condemnation of the Wehrmacht or the Nazi regime, declaring at a family gathering, “Hitler’s only failure was that he did not extinguish all Jews” (34).
Hans-Walter’s essay illustrates the value of family histories and microhistories in underscoring that individuals and families often do not neatly fit into tidy ideological categories in how they live their lives. Hans Zenker’s brother was also a Nazi but took a Jewish bride as a wife and refused to divorce her despite the racial policies of the regime along with the disapproval of his brother. This reviewer wishes the author had told us more about this Jewish woman who married a Nazi and managed to avoid deportation to the death camps.
Several contributors tell stories that underscore the complex nature of identities. For some, the passage of time did not dim their attachment to their homelands. Luis Cortes Farrona, Spanish Civil War refugee in France found himself continuing the fight against fascism as part of the French Resistance. After V-E Day, Luis continued to make his home in France and remained politically active in the Communist Party. A few years after Franco’s death and the establishment of a democratic government in Spain, Luis returned to his homeland. After 40 years, Luis not only made his home in Spain, but rekindled a romance with a woman he had known in his youth. For Thomas Joyce Maloney, a Pittsburgh native who served as a gunner aboard an Army Air Force bomber had his plane shot down over northern Italy, his Roman Catholicism, especially his devotion to the Virgin Mary, was central to his identity. Facing near death from lack of food and enduring bitter winter weather, his overt faith served to bond him with his rescuers in a small village. When two cousins, Fulvio and Beppino Pellizzari from Condino, discovered him, Thomas was holding a rosary and praying at a grotto of the Virgin Mary near their mountain village. The cousins took him to the home of Beppino and the family sheltered him until their village was liberated by American forces.
Within a family, members could hold different identities. Identities could be abandoned. Joseph Samuel Abulafia, a French Moroccan Jew, gave up not only his faith, he even took the surname of his Irish Republican bride and remade himself into Francis Michael Scully. In contrast, Francis’s brother never abandoned his Jewish identity and by remaining in France was murdered during the Holocaust. Despite the strong Republican leanings of his wife, Francis and his wife both moved to Britain and settled in Oxford during the interwar years. During the war, Francis took a position with the British Council and moved to Argentina to promote British authors and books to Spanish-speaking audiences. His son, John Scully whose medical education was interrupted when conscripted, served with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Although John returned to Ireland and finished his medical degrees at Trinity, he eventually went back to England to practice medicine and worked for the British army. Proud of his Irish identity, it also co-existed with a British one. As his daughter remembered, he regularly attended the trooping of the colors in June and when watching the last night of the Proms on the television, he sang along during the performance of “Land of Hope and Glory.” In the midst of the troubles in Northern Ireland, John regularly visited his Irish Republican mother and had to conceal his work with the British army.
Family Histories and World War II includes some heart wrenching stories and shows how the legacies of war can impact several generations. Sylvie Mossay recounts how her grandmother, when deported from Ukraine to work as farm laborer in Germany, had to leave her five-year-old child in the care of her own mother (Sylvie’s great grandmother). Deportation led to exile and she started a new life in Belgium with her second husband, who she met in a resettlement camp. By not returning to her home, she would not meet her daughter again until 1972, when Soviet authorities allowed her to cross the Iron Curtain for a visit to Ukraine. The reunion brought joy to both mother and daughter, but was also fraught with tension.
This book will make an excellent text for courses on World War II, especially ones focusing on the social history of the conflict. It also underscores the cosmopolitan composition of the faculty and staff affiliated with NIU, Galway. Regrettably, the collection has a Eurocentric focus: only one account of a family that has ties to a non-European country—Cormac O. Loideain writes about his uncle, Manny Dos Santos, the son of Portuguese immigrants to British Guiana who enlisted in the Royal Navy in the closing year of the war. There are no accounts of war in China or the Pacific War. But this critique should be read as a call for more of these types of anthologies that grapple with individual families and communities.
In reading these accounts, one cannot help but think that it is unfortunate how many of the World War II generation were not asked to give oral histories or to write down their memories. For while Manny Dos Santos saw no combat while with the Royal Navy, the vessel he served took part in missions designed to prevent Jewish refugees from landing in Palestine. When interviewed by his son, Manny spoke of his time in the navy but said little about the experiences interdicting refugee ships and was not promoted by the interviewer. Of course, for those killed in the war, there is no possibility of asking them about their experiences. Hermann Rasche was only three years of age when his father, Henrich Rasche, died in a prisoner of war camp in late 1945. Rasche only has the recollections of his father offered by his mother and others who asserted that she and her husband despised the Nazi regime. Was Hermann’s father really an ardent opponent of the Nazis and a reluctant conscript? For Hermann, the material culture that survives from the period, specifically the number of books owned by his father that included scores of authors the Nazis had banned, including the works by Freud, Marx, and Thomas Mann, confirms the accuracy of his mother’s recollections.
Several of the chapters conclude with hopeful notes about recent efforts to forge understanding and reconciliation between former adversaries. Sadly, this work was published just before the largest land war in Europe since 1945 erupted in Ukraine. Historians and social scientists seeking to document the current war in Ukraine should definitely add this work to their bookshelf.