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Britain had declared war. “You ought to see what’s going on up in the salon,” she said. “People are sobbing. One woman stopped me and said that there are German submarines waiting for orders to sink this boat. They’ve issued blackout instructions and people are crying—and scared.” Hope responded in his characteristic way. He went to see the captain and arranged to give a special show for the passengers, then started writing himself some new material.
    â€œThanks for the memory,” he sang that night,
    â€œSome folks slept on the floor,
    Some in the corridor;
    But I was more exclusive,
    My room had ‘Gentlemen’ above the door,
    Ah! Thank you so much.”
    Ingrid Bergman, after the triumph of Intermezzo, her first American film for Selznick, had just returned to her family in Stockholm that August. She started a new film in Swedish and celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday, happy that she could once again enjoy “eating everything I want.” The idea of war could hardly be more remote. She was “just sewing up the hems of the new curtains for the living room when I heard over the radio that Germany had invaded Poland.” Her husband insisted that she take their year-old daughter, Pia, and return to America, and since she was half German on her mother’s side, she went from Sweden to Nazi Berlin, then sailed from Genoa.
    Whether Sweden was safe—whether any place was safe—depended on one’s point of view. Bertolt Brecht, who had fled from Germany in 1933, wandered along the whole circuit of sanctuaries from Prague to Paris before ending in Denmark, where, as a lifelong survivor, he decided in the summer of 1939 to flee to Stockholm. Thomas Mann, by contrast, arrived in Stockholm that August as a Nobel Prize laureate scheduled to address a PEN conference on September 1. On hearing of Hitler’s invasion, Mann promptly canceled his speech and flew to London to catch the next sailing of the United States Lines’ Washington.
    And there in London, dying of the cancer that was eating a hole through the side of his face, lay Sigmund Freud, who had foreseen everything and nothing. The incurable wound in his face had begun to give off an appalling stench. When his pet chow was brought to visit him, she cowered in a far corner of the room. The day the war began, Freud lay on a couch in his garden and listened stoically as the radio announced an air raid, then announced that it had been a false alarm. The last book he was able to read was Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin, which he described as “just the book for me—it deals with starvation.” A hearty voice on the radio proclaimed that this was to be the last of wars. Freud’s doctor, Max Schur, asked the dying man whether he could believe that. “Anyhow, it is my last war,” said Freud.
    Igor Stravinsky, too, was surrounded by death. He spent most of that summer of 1939 confined to a tuberculosis sanitarium at Sancellemoz, France. His daughter Mika had died there in the fall of 1938 and his wife, Catherine, the following spring. That June, his mother died. “For the third time in half a year, I heard the Requiem service chanted for one of my own family,” he said, “and for the third time walked through the fields to the cemetery of Saint-Geneviève-de-Bois, in Montlhéry, which is on the road to Orléans, and dropped a handful of dirt in an open grave. And once again I was able to go on only by composing. . . .” He was composing, miraculously, the gay and charming Symphony in C. He was also organizing the reflections that he had agreed to deliver as the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer at Harvard in September. To him, the invasion of Poland was yet another assault. “Igor is in a terrible state of nerves,” his friend Vera Sudeikina wrote in her diary. She had rescued him from the sanitarium, brought him to Paris, and installed him at