Accidental Journey

Lynton Mark

Description

During the early years of World War II, the author-a German Jew from a privileged background-was suddenly catapulted from his idyllic student elite life at Cambridge into a turbulent seven-year odyssey in an internment camp.

Sujets

• World War II
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 1998
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781590209110
• Langue: English

Extrait

MORE PRAISE FOR ACCIDENTAL JOURNEY
“A grandly entertaining, picaresque tale, with the twist that it is not a novel, but the ironic, wittily observed report of actual events during World War II. Among the colorful characters Mark Lynton meets are many of the headline figures of the time, including George VI, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Clement Attlee, the last Kaiser’s grandson, Dr. Werner Best, Himmler, Hoess, and Ed Murrow. Accidental Journey is a not-to-be-put-down book, the best read I’ve encountered all year.”
—A NDRÉ E MMERICH
“This elegantly written, very personal account of the author’s adventures during World War II is both fascinating and exciting from beginning to end. A book of great interest to young and old, it is surely one of the very best written about World War II.”
—G ENE R. L A R OCQUE , Rear Admiral. USN (Ret.)
“Accidental Journey is a great read, chronicling a most remarkable rite of passage. Millions of young men went to war in the 1940s but few had such an extraordinary story to tell, and fewer still could have told it so well. Literate, understated and loaded with a constant parade of famous people who step in and out of Mark Lynton’s wartime experiences, this exhilarating book provides a wild ride across western Europe from D-Day to V-E Day!”
—J OSEPH P. H OAR , General, USMC (Ret)
“Mark Lynton is as amusing as he is modest—though in fact he was heroic. This is the story of a refugee from Hitler interned by the British in 1940, who returns to command a lead tank in an armored division fighting in the Normandy bocage, and finds his true home in America.”
—N OEL A NNAN , (Lord Annan)
Copyright
First published in paperback in 1998 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Lewis Hollow Road Woodstock, New York 12498
Copyright © 1995 Mark Lynton
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-911-0
CONTENTS

Copyright
Foreword
Prologue
“Once Upon a Time …”
Not Forgotten, Just Mislaid: 1939–1941










Labor omnia vincit: 1941–1943








Fear Nought: 1943–1945
















Behind the Scenes and in the Wings: 1945–1947












Epilogue
T o M ARION , L ILI AND M ICHAEL, WHO HAVE READ IT ALL BEFORE, AND TO C LAIRE , N INA AND E LOISE WHO ONE DAY HOPEFULLY WILL.
FOREWORD
P. G. Wodehouse once spoke of an author who told all about how and why he wrote his book, when a simple apology would have been sufficient. I therefore intend to be brief.
A memoir written fifty years after the events, must necessarily be suspect.
However, wars in general—and mine in particular—consist of brief spells of high excitement and even higher anxiety, alternating with very long stretches of just waiting around. I thus had much time to make copious and irreverent notes, which—being of a packrat disposition rather than having any specific intent—I have kept ail these years.
This story is the result, and the events described are all based on facts as I then noted them. It is, of course, true that distance lends enchantment, and so my war, as here described, may not always have seemed quite so entertaining to me at the time.
It may surprise some readers and offend others that, throughout that period, I felt no hostility towards Germans in general; I did not then and I certainly do not now. My feeling towards the Germans I fought against I have tried to describe, and my views towards Germans in general are influenced by the fact that I have never believed in the concept of collective guilt. I do believe in the concept of collective responsibility, but there the past fifty years have shown that the Germans are both aware of such responsibility and shoulder it. Overall, my German roots go deep and remain so.
I am greatly beholden to my publisher, Peter Mayer, who, I suspect, let kindness take precedence over critical acumen. I am truly grateful to my editor Tracy Cams, whose guidance, encouragement, support and criticism gave shape to a jumbled heap of disjointed facts.
I had a lot of fun writing this book and do hope that you will too, in reading it.
Mark Lynton Larchmont, New York 1994
PROLOGUE
I T’S JUNE 1945 and the Grand’ Place in Brussels lies in brilliant sunshine.
Several hundred British officers, members of Montgomery’s victorious Twenty-first Army Group, are being inspected by King George VI.
Wearing full field marshall’s regalia, he slowly walks along the ranks of rigidly still figures and, every so often, pauses and speaks briefly to officers whom he appears to recognize.
Thus he stops in front of Captain Lynton, Third Royal Tanks, and says—haltingly, as was his fashion—”I have seen you before, have I not?”
Stock-still and looking straight ahead as prescribed in the manual, Captain Lynton replies,”… With respect, no Sir!” The king looks at me for a very long moment and then moves on down the line.
It so happens that he was right, and how and why we met before and all that occurred before and since make up this story.
I

ONCE UPON A TIME …
I WAS BORN Max-Otto Ludwig Loewenstein, in Stuttgart, Germany. Both sides of my family had lived in or near Stuttgart for ten generations or more—a documented fact—and claimed earlier antecedents from Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition, which, if not necessarily fiction, remains unverified.
The Loewensteins had first settled in the principality of Loewenstein Fuerstenberg-Wertheim, whose Catholic rulers were tolerant of Jews, which explains why these three names were often adopted among German Jewry. The family subsequently moved to Hechingen, a small town some thirty miles south of Stuttgart and the ancestral home of the imperial Hohenzollern family. The Hohenzollern had left Hechingen centuries before, which may not be the only reason why the Loewensteins never met them.
Moving to Stuttgart in the early 1800s, they evolved from a succession of rabbis and money lenders to repeated generations of lawyers and bankers, a logical progression. Much the same thing happened to my mother’s family, the Kiefes, who, for a number of generations, lived in Baissingen—a small hamlet southeast of Stuttgart—as the local kueffen (barrel makers), which led to the family name. They, too, discovered banking as a more promising profession and moved to Stuttgart. My grandparents were enthusiastic supporters of the king of Wuerttemberg, his overlord, the emperor of Germany, and of all things German; both my father and uncle won Iron Crosses in World War I, and my other uncle was killed in it as an eighteen-year-old volunteer recruit. My father, with both Law and Economics degrees from Heidelberg University, had spent some years in London before 1914 to learn to be a banker. My mother had attended finishing school in England, having been brought up bilin-gually in French and German. (The same Swiss governess responsible for this remained with the family for almost seventy years, so that my brother and I were equally at ease in both languages.)
In all, I came from a background of comfortably situated and convinced Germans, with a somewhat cosmopolitan outlook, who just happened to be of Jewish faith—or so we thought at the time.
My father was named head of a major German car manufacturer in 1922, when I was two years old, and we moved to Berlin, where my brother was born some years later. I had a very warm, happy, affluent and sheltered childhood, and I have equally happy memories of my high school years, which began in 1929 at the Franzoesisches Gymnasium. The school had been founded in the 1640s by and for immigrant French Huguenots, and was unusual in continuing to teach all subjects in French; it thus tended to attract a varied and mostly international body of pupils.
Subsequent events led to my being exposed to school systems in three different countries; I still believe the German system to have been the most balanced and well rounded.
Although no particular event precipitated my departure from Germany (my family remained in Berlin until 1935), my parents decided that—given my familiarity with the language—I should continue my schooling in France, and so I moved to Paris in the autumn of 1933. Living as a boarder with a German refugee family, I attended Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly for the following three years, academically the most taxing time of my life. Most French citizens believe that culture is a French discovery, and all of them are convinced they are its most articulate exponents; so they are, and their school system reflects it. It is intense, highly competitive, very cerebral, highly fact-oriented, wholly impersonal, and only marginally related to practical aspects of life. It will, however, leave you with abiding respect and encyclopedic knowledge of the language and its literature. There has not been a time since when I could not readily and almost reflexively recall a French quotation to fit whatever situation I found myself in. Having passed my French Baccalauréat in the summer of 1936, further education in another language and environment was deemed the appropriate step, and so I headed for England. My parents had, a year earlier, moved from Berlin to Amsterdam.
My going to Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, an English public school of indifferent academic reputation, sterling social standing, and towering military distinction, was an unlikely but very happy accident, which will be dealt with later in this story.
Three years of the French lycée were more than sufficient to allow me to concentrate exclusively on rugby, cricket, and simil