For many years, in talks and documentaries and articles, Frances Stonor Saunders has been pondering the nature of memory and forgetting. She is interested in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, as well as what we choose to hold on to and what we let go of. On a cold grey London day a decade ago, she was given a locked suitcase that had belonged to her father, who had died in 1997 after suffering for a long time from Alzheimer’s disease. It provided her with a way in to a remarkable three-generation memoir. It is also a reminder that there are many aspects of recent history about which we know very little.
Stonor Saunders feels she never really knew her father Donald Slomnicki – the son of a British national of Polish, Russian and Jewish descent living in Romania – who was for her a man “strangely situated in the flora and fauna of his foreignness”. Afraid to confront the suitcase and what it might contain, she turned instead to other research, combing British and Romanian archives, questioning family and friends, picking through letters and diaries, photographs and stamp collections. Her enquiries took her to her grandfather’s life and his work as chief geologist for the Romanian oil industry, and his later involvement in an SOE plot to keep the oil out of Hitler’s hands. Along the way are vividly described accounts of the carving-up of Romania between the Russians, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians in 1940; the country lost half its territory and half its population. Its Jews joined those of France, Belgium, Holland and elsewhere on trains bound for the extermination camps in the East.
The Slomnicki family moved constantly, forced to abandon homes and relations as they fled across borders, packing and repacking their suitcases, losing bit by bit all that they had. Donald and his brother Peter were sent to boarding schools in England, experiencing, in V. S. Naipaul’s words, the “special incompleteness of the outsider”. For months at a time they lost all trace of their father, in hiding from the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators.
Interspersed with the family narrative are disquisitions on historical memory. Stonor Saunders argues that George Santayana’s famous dictum about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it is in fact to miss an essential point. It is because we cannot accept that…
