The Silver Sword

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Born in London, Serraillier was educated at Brighton College and took his degree at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. They float downstream with the current, but the moon makes them visible from the banks of the river. Then they meet orphaned street urchin Jan, who carries with him a talisman of hope: a silver sword paperknife that they recognise as having belonged to their mother. Ian Serraillier, at the time of his appointment as New Windmill editor, was an English teacher at Midhurst Grammar School in Sussex, a poet and author of several novels for children.

The Wolffs are a kind couple who shelter the children en route to Switzerland and help them escape from the Burgomaster, who is required to send them back to Poland. A selection of letters written to Serraillier by students from an Australian school in 1981 draws attention to facets of the story that moved beyond traditional tales of “people running around getting shot like in other wartime stories. The Swiss boat set to take them over the water is not due for hours, and the children decide to take a walk. At the time of its first publication, The Silver Sword was unusual in its depiction of World War II, and its effects on huge swathes of the European population. Their son Rudolf died fighting in the war and Jan struggles to reconcile these two positions: “That there could be any connection between these homely folk and the soldier in the photo was beyond his understanding.In 2011, a year before the centenary of the author's birth, a radio adaptation was produced for BBC Radio 4 Extra. Ruth’s struggles to survive and keep her family safe, the physical dangers she faced, and the emotional toll all of this took on her make her long for comfort, security, and an absolute disavowal of any sort of responsibility or autonomy.

Four years later, Tony Beal reinforced this view: “as the years go by the amount of expurgation necessary becomes less and less – until now we are astonished at some of the things we thought we had to cut out a few years ago” ( 1968).Particularly in the earlier years of the list’s existence, books that were deemed acceptable for private reading were more questionable when considered for use in the classroom. He is too ill during his first winter, and spends his time thinking of his family and his school, which the Nazis closed because someone reported that he had turned the picture of Hitler’s face to the wall. However, when German voices sound out the next morning there, is no time to run to the shed, so Joseph climbs into the chimney. Ruth had admonished Edek for his foolishness and decided that they had to escape to avoid being captured or killed, so the children climbed along the rooftops of the adjacent houses and watched from a distance as their house was blown up by the Nazis. He tells him his plan to jump a train to Switzerland; the boy matter-of-factly says that Joseph will be caught and shot, or else will freeze on the tracks.