second world war

The Blood Years by Elana K Arnold

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  Czernowitz/Chernivtsi/Cernauti, the capital of Bukovina/Bukovyna/Bucovina, is one of those Eastern European cities with a gloriously complicated history of being passed between different rulers.  At the start of the First World War, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a mixed population of German-speaking Jews, German-speaking Catholics, Romanian-speaking Orthodox Christians and Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox Christians. When the empire was dissolved, it became part of Romania.  During the Second World War, it was occupied by the Soviet Union, then retaken by Romania, then allied with the Nazis, and then retaken by the Soviets, formally becoming part of the Ukrainian SSR in 1947.

This book is a fictionalised version of the experiences of the author’s grandmother, a Czernowitz native who, as a young Jewish girl, survived the Holocaust.  The pro-Nazi Romanian government deported tens of thousands of Jewish and Roma people from Bukovina to Transnistria, then under Romanian administration.   This wasn’t done by the Germans, it was done by the Romanians; and the book repeatedly asks how people could just turn on their neighbours like that.  We heard the same question asked during the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Is it long-held hatreds coming to the surface, or is it people jumping on the bandwagon?

Frederieke, the character based on the author’s grandmother, lives in an unusual family set-up.  her father has run off with another woman, and she, her mother, her sister and eventually her sister’s husband all live with her beloved grandfather.  The elderly grandfather is murdered outside his own home by wartime Romanian guards.  On top of all the horrors of the war years, Frederieke is sexually abused by a family “friend”, and suffers from TB.  But, somehow, she survives it all.

The book jumps backwards and forwards at first, which is a bit confusing.  I wish people would just write chronologically!  Life for the Jewish population of the city becomes increasingly difficult in the late 1930s.  When the Soviets come, the retreating Romanian Army carries out a pogrom against the Jews of a neighbouring town, and then the Soviets carry out atrocities of their own, deporting many people, mostly Orthodox Romanians, and killing others.  When the Romanians take over again, the Jewish population is forced into a ghetto, and deportations begin.  But the mayor of Czernowitz arranges for some Jews to be exempted, and, as Frederieke’s brother-in-law is a doctor and her grandfather claims to be an engineer, they are allowed to remain.

In 1945, the Soviets (referred to in the book as “the Russians”) take over again, and encourage non-Ukrainians amongst the local population to leave.  Frederieke chooses to leave … and the book ends there.

It’s quite simplistically written, in the present tense and from the viewpoint of a young girl, only a young child at the start of the book.  But it’s well worth reading.   The Romanian part in the Holocaust, notably in Odesa, tends to be glossed over.  And so many of these cities which were ethnically and religiously mixed for centuries ceased to be so as a result of the Holocaust, of changing borders, and of what would now be called “ethnic cleansing” at the end of the war.

Chernivtsi, as it’s now called, has, in the last four years, received a significant influx of people fleeing Russian attacks elsewhere in Ukraine, some of them hoping to cross the border into Romania.   It’s nicknamed “Little Vienna”, or sometimes “Little Prague”.  It would be nice to go there, and to Lviv, were it safe to go to Ukraine at the moment.

We seem to be a very long way away from early 1990, when we were supposed to be entering an era of peace!   36 years … how has it possibly been 36 years?

Maybe, one day.  In the meantime, this is a fascinating book about a little-known part of the atrocities of the war years.

 

King’s Ransom by Jan Beazely and Thom Lemmons

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This is back to the Second World War in Bulgaria, and the true story of the cancellation of the deportations.  The authors have created two fictional characters and partially turned the story into a romance-cum-adventure, running alongside the story of King Boris’s attempts to placate the Nazis without sacrificing Bulgaria’s Jewish community.  The resultant novel is a bit daft, but it’s got a good heart and the two fictional characters are very appealing.

Lily Panitza, who appeared in fictionalised form in Acts of Courage, appears in this book as herself – but, here, she’s passing intelligence on to Daria Richetti, an Italian-Jewish girl (er, with a Slavic first name, despite being Italian) from an orphanage, who is Queen Giovanna’s lady-in-waiting and governess to Crown Prince Simeon and his sister.   (Ahem, how likely is it that a girl from an orphanage would be a senior courtier?!)   Daria becomes romantically involved with Dobri Dimitrov, a young military officer.   Then she’s kidnapped, and Dobri heroically rescues her.   They get married and live happily ever after.

As I said, it’s a bit daft, but some of the scenes involving King Boris and his struggles to keep everything together are really quite poignant, as are Daria’s fears about what will happen to her, and her feelings almost of guilt at being under the protection of powerful people.   There were some stirring comments about not letting bullies control you.  A lot easier to say on paper than in the face of Nazi persecution, but still.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad book.   I just feel so sad that we can’t seem to get away from wars and persecution.  Some Job’s comforter on Sky News has been going on about how maybe the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan will somehow all combine.   Thanks for that, mate.

I’ve turned over to the tennis now.  But at least this book was positive, in that the Jewish community of Bulgaria was saved.

 

Operation Mincemeat – Lowry Theatre, Salford

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  Following the success of the film of the same name, the crazy, incredible true story of how the body of William Martin, “the man who never was”, tricked the Nazis into pulling out of Sicily and leaving the way clear for the Allies to land there is now pretty well-known.   This is a musical version of it – but it’s a send-up.  Like Daisy Pulls It Off sent up girls’ school stories, this sends up spy stories and the entire British intelligence system, to music.

Is it OK to send up the Second World War?   Well, yes, of course it is – within certain boundaries, obviously.   Those of us who grew up in the ’80s still use the catchphrases from the wonderful ‘Allo ‘Allo.   Even earlier than that, there was the famous “Don’t Mention The War” episode of Fawlty Towers.  The idiots who object to both of those would probably love this, because it’s the British, in particular the upper-crust British, and occasionally the Americans, who are being sent up!

It has its serious side, though.   There’s a poignant song about how one of the older team members lost her sweetheart in he First World War.   We’re frequently reminded that, however daft the plan is, hundreds of thousands of lives may depend on it.  We’re also reminded how credit often goes to those at the top of the food chain, not the ones who’ve actually done most of the work, especially if those who’ve done most of the work are female.  And, at the end, we’re told about the homeless ,man who died alone, many miles from home, and whose body was used.  There’s now a memorial to him in Spain, where he was washed ashore.

There’s a cast of only five people, all playing several roles – including a man whose main role is that of a woman, and two women whose main roles are that of men.  They do amazingly well: doing all that, twice a day, must be exhausting!

Are any of the songs memorable?   Well, I don’t think they’ll be joining the ranks of those musicals’ songs which everyone knows.   But it’s lively and it’s funny.  And it was a sell-out, even on a Wednesday night.  That’s some achievement for the first production by SplitLip, who wrote both the music and the words.   It’s been to the West End and to Broadway, and is now going on a world tour.   Don’t be expecting Rodgers and Hammerstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber, but expect a good night out, and you’ll get one!

Out of the Mountain’s Shadow by Rose Alexander

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  I generally avoid dual timeline novels, but it’s not easy to find books set in Albania; and the story of how the Albanian code of honour saved the lives of many Jewish refugees during the Second World War, almost lost because of Enver Hoxha cutting Albania off from the outside world for so many years, deserves to be more widely-known.  Rose Alexander’s style of writing is rather simplistic, but this is a good story.

In the present day, Ruth, a middle-aged career woman from Norfolk, has unexpectedly been made redundant from her job in journalism, and takes herself off on a long holiday to Italy, to try to think about where her life goes from here.  There, she meets (the tall, dark, handsome, natch) Albanian Zack, who tells her about how his father Bekim, now elderly and seriously ill, helped to save the lives of Jewish refugees as a teenager during the war, and is desperate to find one of them, Hannelore, and the precious religious articles which she entrusted to his keeping.

Zack gives Ruth Bekim’s memoir of those days, and that’s where the dual timeline comes in.   There’s a romance between Bekim and Hannelore, because this, whilst being historical fiction, is also a bit chick-lit-ish, but the story of the risks taken by Albanians to save the lives of Jewish refugees from other countries, in this case Austria, really should be more widely-known, as I’ve said.  For one thing, it’s a reminder that there are always good people in the world.  For a second thing, Albania does not have the best reputation in the world, but it deserves high praise for this.  For a third thing, at a time when certain factions are trying to use the conflict in the Middle East to stir up sectarian feeling in the UK and elsewhere, it might do people good to know how much the (then) only Muslim-majority country (entirely) in Europe did to help persecuted Jews.

Of course, they do manage to trace Hannelore, now living in America, and to find the items that were left with Bekim.  And there’s a ridiculously silly bit in which Ruth gets lost in the Albanian mountains, nearly dies, and is heroically rescued by Zack … which whom she, of course, then gets together.   It’s not exactly Gone With The Wind,  but it does a praiseworthy job of telling a story about which not enough people know.

I’ve got ten billion books (this is only a slight exaggeration) waiting to be read, and there is also a lot of sport going on.   I could do with three months’ paid leave and a robot that does the housework.  Oh well.

Acts of Resistance by Dominic Carrillo

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  Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day.  As a reminder that there are always good people in the world, maybe spare a few thoughts for the countries where the worst of the Holocaust was actively prevented – Denmark, Morocco, Bulgaria and Albania (and arguably Finland).  This book’s about what happened in Bulgaria.

Bulgaria wasn’t Denmark, where heroic resistance workers and other members of the public helped almost the entire Jewish community to escape to neutral Sweden.  *Shout out across the North Sea to our Danish friends/allies, who deserve to be treated with every respect.*  In Bulgaria, the authorities were allied with the Nazis, and they did deport many Jewish people internally and force young Jewish men into the Labour Corps.  And the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews” very soon became a historical battleground, with the post-war communist regime trying to claim credit where it wasn’t due.  Also, it should be noted that thousands of Jews from Bulgarian-occupied areas of Greece and North Macedonia were deported to the concentration camps.  HOWEVER, thanks to support from the population in general, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, politician Dimitar Peshev and possibly (there’s a lot of dispute over this) King Boris, the planned deportation of the Bulgarian Jewish community, 48,000 people, from Nazi-allied Bulgaria was stopped, and their lives were saved.

This wasn’t advertised as a young adult book, but it read like one.  The language was very colloquial.  Very American colloquial.  And the story was told through the eyes of three young people, two teenage boys and a woman in her twenties, and in the form of diary entries.  That wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but it didn’t make the story any less interesting.

Many of the people featured were real.  One of them was Alexander Belev, the Bulgarian commissar of “Jewish affairs”, a strong supporter of the deportations.   His secretary, probably also his mistress, Liliana Panitza, warned a Jewish friend about the planned deportations.  She was represented in the book by a fictional character called Lily, who was Belev’s secretary and later mistress, but who warned the Jewish community and the resistance movement about what’s planned.  At the end of the book, she was tortured by the communists.  The real Liliana died shortly afterwards.

Part of the story was told by Liliana, and the rest by two fictional boys called Michael and Peter.  (Many names were given in English, so Mikhail rather than Mikhail, etc.)  Michael, a Jewish boy, was being hidden by Metropolitan Stefan – another real person, the head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, who played an important role in what’s called “the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews”.  In the book, Michael, whom we saw meeting Rabbi Daniel Zion, another real person, and King Boris, was shown as the (unknown) Jewish partisan who assassinated Belev as he tried to flee in 1944. The other boy, Peter, was from Kyustendil, the town from which the deportations were due to take place, and formed part of a delegation to Peshev, who was also from Kyustendil.  Peter may not have existed, but the delegation certainly did.  Peter later joined the resistance, and was shown as working with both Michael and Lily.

After the war, the Communists tried Peshev as a collaborator.  His role in saving so many lives was only recognised just before his death.  Some of what happened was suppressed until the communist regime collapsed.

As for King Boris, what happened is still hotly debated.  His idea was that, whilst he opposed the deportations, Bulgarian Jews and political prisoners should be deported elsewhere, or used as forced labour within Bulgaria.  On the other hand, he’s supposed to have helped thousands of Slovakian Jews to obtain visas to leave Europe.  And some people take the view that the forced labour idea was a way of avoiding the deportations without risking intervention by Germany.  Shortly after a meeting with Hitler in August 1943, he died suddenly.  Did the Nazis poison him because they were angry about his refusal to back the deportations?   We’ll probably never know.

There remain different narratives about the whys and wherefores of what happened.  But the deportations were stopped, and many lives were thereby saved.  In the worst of times, there are nearly always some shining lights.  Well done, Bulgaria, and thank you.

#HolocaustMemorialDay

 

 

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen

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This is an extremely silly story.  However, the author’s clearly done some research into the Second World War period in Glen Urquhart/Drumnadrochit, and that comes across well, notably the presence of lumberjills and Canadian airmen, and a bombing raid on an aluminium factory on the shores of Loch Ness … although it would have been rather considerably better had she not decided to “move” the air raid from 1941 to 1945, and shown everyone carrying masks and constantly having to run to air raid shelters during the last few months of the war.  There are some things that you really shouldn’t try to move!

The premise of the story was that three wealthy Philadelphians, a husband and wife and their (male) friend, having annoyed everyone by getting drunk at a party, crossed the Atlantic (er, during the war) on a ship carrying wounded soldiers (from America to Scotland?) and then went to look for the Loch Ness monster.   As you do.

They rocked up at a small inn, run by Angus, a widowed war hero who’d been discharged from the Armed Forces after being seriously injured.  The two American men were not in uniform because one had flat feet and the other had pretended to be colour blind.  Apparently, no-one could find them anything else to do, so they’d just been hanging around at parties.  They somehow obtained ration books.  Was it as easy as that?   The men went out to look for the monster, expected to be waited on hand and foot, and got on everyone’s nerves.  Maddie, the wife, made friends with the staff at the inn and got sick of her husband.  Who decided that he was going to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital.  There were references to Mrs Rochester.

There was also a lot of talk about the Wee Frees.  The author obviously liked this term, because she kept using it.  AFAIK, it’s considered pejorative.  But the press kept using it a few years ago, when Kate Forbes was standing for the leadership of the SNP.  Are Wee Free farmers such strict sabbatarians that they lock up their cockerels on Sundays, so that they can’t, er, get up to anything with the hens?   It’s such a daft story that it sounds as if it has to be true, and that the author must have heard it from someone!  Her other favourite term was “National Loaf”, also used repeatedly.

Maddie decided that she wanted to divorce her husband, who really was vile, and marry Angus.  But the really vile husband, who was worried that she’d tell his parents that he’d faked the colour blindness and that he’d be disinherited, threatened to shop Angus for poaching.  However, it turned out that Angus was actually the local laird, having recently inherited the title from his uncle, apparently without anyone noticing.  So he couldn’t have been poaching, because it was his land.  Phew.  Meanwhile, the husband and his mate, having failed to find the monster, were going to fake some photos to make it look as if they had.  But he then obligingly drowned.  At the water’s edge.  This was possibly due to the monster, or, alternatively to the ghost of Angus’s late first wife.  Keep up.

So Maddie married Angus, and they moved into the big house and lived happily ever after.

I did say that it was an exceptionally silly story!   But some of the details about wartime life in the area were interesting.

Nuremberg

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  I missed this one at the pictures, so thank you to Sky Cinema for showing it so soon after it was released.  It’s had some mixed reviews, but I thought that it was very good.  There’ve been a lot of Second World War and Holocaust films/books/TV series in recent years.  This one was trying to do something a bit different, and it succeeded.

Pretty much every character in the film was a depiction of a real person – led by Russell Crowe as Hermann Goring, Rami Malek as American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, and Leo Woodall as Howie Triest, Kelley’s Jewish interpreter who’d escaped from Germany to the USA but whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust.  The focus was on Kelley’s attempts to assess Goring and on the fact of the trials taking place, rather than on public reaction to the trials and to learning the details of what the Nazis did.

Channel 4 showed two programmes, a couple of months ago, about Hitler’s DNA.  People are still looking for some sort of answers as to what makes a monster.  DNA doesn’t seem to give those answers, and, from what this filmed showed, even psychiatric assessment struggles with them.  But Kelley’s main remit was to determine whether or not Goring was likely to commit suicide.  The film showed how hard the Allies tried to stop those on trial from taking their own lives and cheating the hangman.  Of course, regrettably, they didn’t succeed with Goring, who managed to obtain cyanide and take it.  But not before denying any knowledge of the “Final Solution”, and claiming that what the Nazis did was just part of warfare.

Russell Crowe was superb.  Rami Malek as Kelley …  well, Kelley was pretty annoying, so it couldn’t come across as purely goodie versus baddie, and he also seemed to get rather obsessed with Goring.  But the real footage of what happened in the concentration camps was the most important part of the film.  Whatever you think of what Hollywood did with this, just watch that footage and remember.  Never forget,

The film seemed to be saying that mid twentieth century Americans were the first people to come up with the idea of international peace and justice.  Didn’t Cardinal Wolsey suggest something similar in 1518?!  But, point taken, the Nuremberg charter – drafted in London, with the UK, the US, France and the USSR all involved, not just the US! – established the form of trials to be held by international courts, the idea of crimes against humanity which superseded national laws and national jurisdictions.  It would have been a lot easier just to have put all the senior Nazis up before a firing squad, and I don’t suppose that too many people would have objected.  Of course, if you tried it now, you’d have some “human rights” lawyer from Brighton screeching that Goring couldn’t be put on trial because he was once picked on at school or something, and the Fruit and Nut Party (sorry, “Your Party”) saying that Churchill and Truman should be tried instead.

Maybe other countries should have been more involved.  Maybe survivors should have been more involved.  But the idea was that the documentary evidence was much more difficult to argue with than testimony from individuals.

What came across very well in the film was how unrepentant those on trial were.   They didn’t seem to think that they’d done anything wrong.

And, at the end, Howie Triest said that people should have spoken up against the Nazi regime.  Why were so many people impassive against evil?

There are a worrying number of stupid and ignorant people who howl that anyone who does anything they don’t like is “acting against Nazi Germany”.  No.  They’re not.  Unless you think that they’re carrying out an industrial extermination operation.

And, two days ago, someone smashed up the Broughton Park memorial bench which commemorated a man who survived eight concentration camps and later settled in Manchester, which contained an audio recording of him talking about some of his experiences.  And threw the pieces into the lake.  That’s where we’re at, with some people.  We need education.  If this film can provide some of that, then all power to it.

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

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  Hooray, I have finally got to the end of this rather strange book!  I did sort of enjoy it, but it felt like one of those books which should be read as a set text at school, with a teacher assuring the class that there were all sorts of hidden meanings which the author may or may not have intended!

It’s narrated by “unreliable narrator” Oskar, who switches from the first person to the third person at random, and is telling his story whilst shut up in a German asylum for the “Ring Finger Murder”, which he didn’t actually commit.  He was born in the Free City of Danzig, in 1924, to a Polish-Kashubian mother whose family seem to be obsessed with skirts and potatoes, and either her cousin/lover or her German husband – no-one’s quite sure which.  At the age of three, he decides that he doesn’t like the adult world and is going to stop growing.  So he stays the size of a three-year-old.   But possibly fathers a child with his stepmother.  And has a voice which can shatter glass.  And is obsessed with tin drums, regularly getting new ones until the local toy shop is destroyed when the Kristallnacht riots reach Danzig/Gdansk.  We then go into the Second World War.

Oskar’s Polish father is killed by the Nazis, and then his German father is killed by the Soviets.  Oskar joins a group of performing dwarfs entertaining the German troops, but then returns to Danzig.  And leads a gang of hooligans.  When the Germans are expelled, he, his stepmother and the child move to Dusseldorf.  He then grows a bit more.  And becomes a successful drummer.  But is then falsely accused of murdering a neighbour, and locked up in an asylum.

The author was sued because the book goes on about Jesus and Satan, and includes some bedroom scenes.  Oh, and there are various random mentions of a) Elizabeth I and b) Eugene of Savoy.

It’s just all very weird, but academics love it because it’s supposed to be an allegory of the inter-war period and the Second World War.  It genuinely is quite interesting in its way, but it’s not the sort of thing I usually read.

 

Death in Danzig by Stefan Chwin

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  I don’t know who decided to use “Death in Danzig”, which sounds like a detective novel, rather than just using the name of the main character as the original Polish language novel did.  It’s not a detective novel: it’s a Second World War novel.  That’s “the Second World War”, not “World War II”.  Even the presenters of this morning’s Remembrance Sunday programme were saying “World War II”.  So annoying!   It makes it sound like a film franchise.  Anyway!  This is actually an immediately post Second World War novel, showing the flight and expulsion of the German population of Danzig, and the influx of Poles from other areas, many of them from parts of Galicia which had been transferred to Soviet Ukraine, into the city.

Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, and heard about how the same thing happened there, but I don’t think I really took it just what a total change it was.  Every street, every landmark, every public building, every park was given a new, Polish, name.  In Gdansk, a predominantly Protestant city became a predominantly Catholic city.   All change.  Hundreds of thousands of people moved about.  In this book, we see the Polish characters moving into a house which still contains someone else’s furniture and other belongings, and even traces of them such as hairs in the bathroom sink.

The book centres on one German, who remained behind, a newly-arrived Polish family, a female refugee who claims to be Ukrainian, and a young deaf boy taken in by the family.  It’s all pretty miserable, and ends up with several characters fleeing from the new communist authorities.   But it’s an interesting picture of an aspect of the time not often spoken about in the West.

The expulsion of the remaining Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia was agreed at the Potsdam Conference.   There were various rationales for it.  One was that it’d work better to have ethnically homogeneous states in East Central Europe – which makes some sense, but doesn’t really work when you consider than there were (and are) Hungarian minorities in several different countries, and that Czechoslovakia (the clue’s in the name) was never going to be ethnically homogeneous.  Some ethnic Hungarians were actually chucked out of the Slovak areas of Czechoslovakia, but not to Hungary – instead, to parts of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia from which ethnic Germans had just been deported.  But other Hungarians were deported from Czechoslovakia to Hungary, whilst Slovaks in Hungary were sent the other way.  Keep up.  At least it all seems to have been managed without the issues that arose between Greece and Turkey.

Anyway, to get back to the point, another argument was that large German minorities might cause trouble.  Stalin seems to have thought that it would drive a wedge between Germany and its Slavic neighbours – although surely the events of the war had done that already.  And there seems to have been a widespread feeling that the Germans deserved it.  Especially in East Prussia, because of this obsessive idea that “Prussian militarism” was to blame for everything – which I suppose you can argue for the First World War, but not for the Second World War.  Today, it’d be called “ethnic cleansing” and “collective punishment”.  At the time … given what had happened in Poland and Czechoslovakia, we probably shouldn’t be judging.

Then again, we certainly judge the abhorrent behaviour of the Red Army.  But what happened with the Germans was all agreed.  A lot of ethnic Germans were also thrown out of Hungary and Romania, and some were expelled from the Netherlands and Yugoslavia.   This was the mood in the second half of the 1940s.

And so Gdansk, the former Free City of Danzig, became entirely Polish.   And Poland, formerly 10% Jewish – 30% in Warsaw – became almost entirely Catholic, as a result of the Holocaust.  And it also became Communist, until it was led to freedom by Lech Walesa, a Gdansk shipyard worker whose father died of exhaustion and illness after being interned in a forced labour camp by the Nazis.

Eastern European history (or Central European history, as Poland prefers to class itself as being in Central European) can be very messy and very confusing.  This book shows a small part of that.  It doesn’t half make you think.

 

All Creatures Great and Small, Season 6 – Channel 5

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  I can’t believe that another series is over already!   It only seems to have been back for five minutes.  And what a moving finale, especially coming so close to Remembrance Day.

We saw James, little Jimmy (how brilliant is the young lad who plays Jimmy?), Siegfried, Tristan and Mrs Hall all gathered round the radio as Clement Attlee announced that Japan had surrendered and so the war was finally over.  And we saw Tristan talking about seeing his best friend die in a field of landmines, and telling his girlfriend that he didn’t think he’d ever be “the same chap” again.  Another of the men in the village was also struggling to cope, whilst news had come that another villager hadn’t survived.

Jimmy, having lived his entire life in wartime, asked his dad if things were going to be different from now on.  And, as everyone came together for a street party, elderly farmer Elijah spoke about the sacrifices that everyone had made.

I didn’t think that the reboot could beat the 1988-90 adaptation, but I think that setting it more firmly in the context of the 1930s and the 1940s has worked really well.  Roll on the Christmas special!