Two True Stories

Sometimes you hear stories of those years of war that scared the first half of the twentieth century that you cannot let pass because they stick with you, they say too much, paint too strong a picture. In this last year I have heard two such stories, one from the Ukraine, one from China.

First a story from the Ukraine. This was told by a lecturer at the university in L’viv who had been a little more than a child herself at the time of the German occupation. She included this in one of the lectures she gave.

After the first shock wave of the German conquest the two sides, the occupiers and their subjected peoples, had to set about living together. The occupiers gave themselves full licence to demonstrate their superiority in all sorts of ways, in this case over the two carriage trams that ran in the city. The Ukrainians had to travel in the rear carriage of the trams leaving the front carriage for Germans. Perhaps there might be only one or two Germans in the front - the rear one would be crammed to overflowing. Sometimes one of the Germans might call a child forward into the front to come and sit with them as a treat. If you were called you dare not refuse but went and sat dutifully as you were told. No one dared to interfere.

Neither did people dare to be in the front carriages even if they were completely empty, even if there were no signs of any Germans being about - it was just never safe.

Such a simple story, but one telling so much about power and fear, about oppression and the oppressed, about division and separation. One no doubt duplicated in a thousand subtle ways across the world - in segregated America, in racially divided South Africa, or by division of wealth and class in Britain, or by caste as in India - repeated in so many place, in so many ways. in so many times.

The second story is from China, from Shanghai just at the point when it had been occupied by the Japanese in November 1937. Many, if not most, of the Europeans left the city on whatever ships they could find as soon as the fighting subsided . My friends mother was working as a governess to one such European family. She had done well for a village girl from the South to have a job like that. For whatever reason the family decided to take her with them when they left. Who knows, perhaps the children she cared for were too attached to her to make leaving her easy? Getting her out through the Japanese check points would be a very risky thing to do. Europeans were given passes so that they could go to the harbour and board whatever ships they could find passage on. Chinese were forbidden. The Japanese expected absolute obedience. If they even considered that a Chinese had not bowed quickly enough or low enough they were executed there and then.

The family put my friend’s mother into the middle between them all and there she sat petrified in case she was spotted. For trying to escape the city she would have been beheaded immediately. Somehow, and my friend has no idea how, the family were not challenged at the check points. At each one their papers were meticulously inspected, but other than a cursory glance, no check was made on exactly who was in the car. They were crowded and perhaps a small Chinese woman somewhere in the middle of many faces was simply not noticed.

They left on the last boat out of the harbour.