I had to go to Lithuania as a friend of mine had died. A researcher, diplomat and expert on all matters Soviet, my pal had been expelled from Moscow as part of a diplomatic tit-for-tat. Heartbroken, she spent her last years as an Englishwoman exiled in her own country.
I became an honorary member of her merry band of defectors, a group of habitually drunk octogenarians whose passages to the West she had arranged. Her papers, covering decades of her life and travels in the USSR, were to be donated to a Vilnius archive. So a memorial event was held in her honour, which I was to attend.
But when I mentioned my travel plans to my mother on the telephone, she delightedly told me that Vilnius is only four-and-half hours from the Wolf’s Lair, Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front bunker.
For my mother, regarding both geography and conversation, all roads lead to Hitler. When I noted the location of the Lair in a bid to dissuade her, she pointed out, as the Fuhrer presumably did himself back in September 1939, that we could just nip over the border into Poland.
My mother was born in 1950, yet took the Second World War very badly. She has developed a lifelong interest in the Third Reich and will elaborate upon her thoughts to anyone who will listen – and a great number who will not.
A softly spoken and slightly built woman, at the end of the first COVID lockdown, she was, within minutes of our tearful reunion, explaining that ‘his greatest mistake was invading Russia, because that constituted a war on two fronts’.
For the avoidance of doubt, her fixation stems not from any admiration for Nazism, but rather from a revulsion at its evils and an attempt to understand how seemingly decent people can succumb to such depravity. That does not, however, make her any less embarrassing at parties, restaurants or my university graduation ceremony. (Apologies again, Professor Schulz).
She had mentioned the Lair a few times previously: I suspected our old friend the History Channel was the culprit. As she told me, a visit to the Wolfsschanze was a dream comparable only to meeting Cliff Richard, and would buy me at least a year with no mention of grandchildren.
