4 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

I’m trying to recall when I was first aware of Jews as a people somehow “different” from us Christians. Did I know, for example, that Ernst, our Kindertransport guest, was Jewish? Did you ever make us aware of that—you must of course have known—and did it matter to you? There were no Jews in our little English country village. Indeed, I had scarcely any history with Jews until I married Ellie, when I was already in my thirties!

What did I even know, back then, and what did you tell me about the Holocaust? I was eight years old at the time the camps were liberated, and you may have considered me too young to know about, let alone understand such horrors. I suspect that you’d have wanted to protect me from the terrible, heart-rending truth about the depravities of our fellow man. I believe that I learned about it only later from my history lessons.

And yet… and yet… When Flora and I were still quite little, our mother, Peggy, used to read us bedtime stories from a book called “All Saints at Six O’Clock.” One of the stories she read was that of “Little Saint Hugh,” a boy who lived in the dark back streets in the town of Lincoln (I always had the impression that it was an Eastern European ghetto, but no, this was in my own country, England, in the Middle Ages) and was supposedly sacrificed by Jews in what I now know to be the infamous “blood libel” myth that continues, even today, to be propagated amongst the more rabid anti-Semites of the world.

It was a truly beastly story, yet Peggy calmly included it without judgment or explanation with all the other saints’ stories that she read us, apparently unashamed to share its disgraceful slander with her children. Did she believe this calumny against the Jews? Surely not! I prefer to think that her anti-Semitism was not malicious—I still fail to see a shred of malice in her—but rather pure, unquestioned ignorance, reflecting more on benighted, ancient, shameful Christian lore than on her character.

Still—I need to say this, Harry—there was a grievously intuitive and unexamined part of Peggy’s otherwise kind, generous personality (witness her welcoming of all and sundry into her home in the war years and her caring mothering of them all!) that bespoke prejudice, and not only of Jews but of people of other heritages and skin colors. She was, she herself would readily admit, a snob, whose class-consciousness was sometimes an embarrassment.

It pains me to say that Ellie was conscious of Peggy’s—let me avoid the term anti-Semitism, which mischaracterizes her—but of her hesitation in embracing those whose culture she neither knew nor understood. There was, Ellie tells me of their first encounter at the railway station in Carmarthen where you came to pick us up, and in the car on the drive home, a kind of subtle recoil, a kind of drawing back that she, Ellie, felt quite keenly—and I do not doubt her feeling. But I do believe that Peggy always made the effort to overcome her prejudices, when she was aware of them, and that she was at heart a generous, kind and loving person.

Is any of this new to you? I imagine not. You lived together and loved each other “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health” for more than sixty years.

Fond memories, then, of both of you, Peter