Persephone Arbour

For most of my adult life I have known about the extraordinary Dr. Viktor Frankl. A Jewish psychologist and scholar who, on finally being freed from the Nazi concentration camps of WW2, was able to write his extraordinary book Man’s Search for Meaning. Imagine my delight when, seemingly by accident, I came across this series of three videos of the man himself talking with beautiful clarity about his thoughts on this whole matter.

How can a human being experience the most extreme suffering and not only survive, but survive with a full and meaningful life? Discovering these videos brought back to me a very meaningful part of my life: Most of my childhood was spent in North-West London. There are large Jewish communities in this area, many settling in Golders Green, which was not far from my home in Cricklewood. I lived in a house very close to Gladstone Park and just round the corner from a synagogue.

From about the age of five, my best friend was Cynthie Bernard – who lived almost opposite me. Her home was heaven. It was so much more exciting than my own. Her parents were volatile, noisy and demonstrative Russian Jews and I loved them. Of course, I loved my own parents very much – but – let’s face it, they weren’t ‘different’ in the same way as Cynthie’s. I felt I fitted there more than in my own home.

Rikka, Cynthie’s mother, couldn’t understand why I liked lettuce and cheese. She called me ‘little rabbit’. When I was there I was fed Matzos, and other foods with un-remembered names. However, Matzos have stayed one of my favourites to this day. Rikka also kept chickens in her back garden and often passed eggs on to us.

At the beginning of the war a gun battery was built in the park, very near to our house. The army moved into rows and rows of wooden huts that we passed every day on our way to Mora Road School. It is odd that, in the tiny village where I now live, I also occasionally go to sleep to the sound of guns, firing on the range near my cottage. I don’t mind them at all – it is a familiar sound – there is no fear attached for me. The camp we used to walk past each day was a friendly place, the soldiers would always wave and smile.

Just before war started, my parents were asked to sponsor a Jewish banker and his wife, Martin and Irma Goldman, in order to enable them to leave Germany. My parents had met them previously when visiting Frankfurt on a tandem-riding holiday. At the time, my uncle, Herbert Morrison, then a Labour politician, was somehow able to help arrange a passage for them to the USA. All during the war, and afterwards, they consistently sent us food and clothing parcels.

Before they arrived at our house, I also have a vivid memory of standing (aged 5) by my mother’s grand piano in the ‘front-room’. My father was telling me about the imminent arrival of these two people, and the reasons why. Even so young, I understood the connection between the trauma of these two people and this other, dearly loved family who lived so close to me. I can still see this small, five-year old stamping her feet, crying and screaming “Why wasn’t I born a Jew? It’s so unfair!” Unusually for him, my father couldn’t find an answer. He just hugged me.

My friendship with Cynthie was the strongest of my peripatetic war-time childhood. To my shame, when I eventually went to boarding school in 1946, I let our friendship fade. The Bernard family had moved away to Golders Green by this time and I guess I had other fish to fry. Cynthie died when she was only twenty-one, from cancer. I have never forgotten her, or her noisy and loving family.

I have had a fellow-feeling and love for Jewish people ever since. I never felt that I fitted in – anywhere. At boarding school I wrote an essay, rather grandly called ‘The Persecution of the Jews.’ It was a passionate defence of the talents, tragedies and intelligence of these remarkable people. I was sixteen at the time, a boarder at a public school where anti-semitism was rife. My R.E. teacher, a wise woman, gave me an A+ for this essay!

I didn’t expect to write all this – yet here ‘tis! If he were still alive I would write to Dr. Frankl and thank him for his wise words and how they opened memories that still touch me.