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close with the bottles around her. “Gigeto,” I screamed, “Santina must not die.” But she did.’ Many people who had lost their homes by bombardment or expulsion were reduced to a primitive mountain existence, as a young girl described: ‘The cold and damp of the caves got into our bones. My mother crouched in a corner clutching my three-month-old brother in her arms. She told me to go into the town and find a doctor. I ran like a hare, but found that he was away from home – at the house of the Podestàs whose son had a high temperature like my brother. Eventually he gave me a prescription – but he wouldn’t give me any of the drugs that were on his table. He said he would come and visit, but when he arrived my little brother was already dead.’ Their distraught mother said, ‘My baby boy died because my milk was bad because I didn’t eat enough.’ She was one among millions.

People displaced from their homes and countries spent much of the war waiting: for orders or visas; an opportunity to flee from looming peril; permission to travel. Twenty-one-year-old English girl Rosemary Say, having escaped from German internment into the Vichy zone of France, kicked her heels for weeks in Marseilles among an unhappy community of fellow fugitives: ‘It was sad to see the waste of intellect and ability as the delays lengthened and the future for many continued to look bleak. Had he got his visa at last, had he been arrested or just scarpered into the countryside to try his luck? We waited and wondered. But if the person didn’t come back he was soon forgotten. We were only really held together by a common wish to be off and away and to begin our lives again … There was a lot of suspicion and hopelessness … Feelings ran high and quarrels were loud and violent. We all shared the worry of our uncertainty.’

Ukrainian teenager Stefan Kurylak was shipped westwards by the German occupiers to labour for an Austrian Alpine farming family, devout Catholics named Klaunzer. On first sighting the boy, Frau Klaunzer burst into tears; without knowing why, the young Ukrainian followed suit. It was explained to him that the Klaunzers’ son had been killed on the Eastern Front a few weeks before. Frau Klaunzer kept mouthing one of the few German phrases Stefan could understand: ‘Hitler no good! Hitler no good!’ Stefan was thereafter treated with kindness and humanity: he worked on the family land, not unhappily, until the end of the war, when his hosts begged him in vain to stay on as one of themselves.

Few such experiences were so benign. Fourteen-year-old Pole Arthur Poznaski returned to the Piotrków ghetto one day in October 1942 from the Hortensja glassworks where he and his younger brother Jerzyk worked. He was handed a crumpled note by a member of the ghetto’s Jewish militia. It was from his mother. There had been a deportation: ‘We are being taken. May God help you, Arthur. We cannot do anything more for you, and whatever may happen, look after Jerzyk. He is but a child and has got no one else, so be his brother and parent. Goodbye …’ Arthur, passionately moved, kept repeating to himself, ‘I’ll try! Yes, I’ll try!’ But he thought, ‘How? I felt so lonely and helpless.’ The boys spent the rest of the war in concentration camps, separated by hundreds of miles, but both miraculously survived; the rest of their family perished.

The British endured six years of austerity and spasmodic bombardment. The night blackout promoted moral as well as physical gloom. Yet the circumstances of Churchill’s islands were much preferable to those of Continental societies, where hunger and violence were endemic. Like North America, Britain was shielded by expanses of sea, relative personal freedom and wealth. Privileged Britons remained privileged indeed: ‘The extraordinary thing about the war was that people who really didn’t want to be involved in it were not,’ the novelist Anthony Powell wrote afterwards.

This was true, within a limited social milieu. The week before D-Day, as 250,000 young American and British soldiers made final preparations for hurling themselves at