As I found out long ago, in areas such as Saxony, the Black Forest and Bavaria, there were many Jewish families with the name Lehman because, at some point in the Middle Ages or later, they had found it politically useful to change their original Jewish names – Löw or Loeb. If my father had belonged to such a family, was he related to Kaufmann by blood or by marriage? I have consulted the Norwegian Dictionary of National Biography, and read its entry on Kaufmann so many times that by now I should be able to recite it by heart, but it is utterly unhelpful. Perhaps the question must be put another way. For what reason would a probably Jewish boy turn up in a Norwegian children’s colony during the German occupation of the country? ‘Hiding in plain sight’? Almost all the photos in Helga’s collection that include Frank (or Franz, as the members of the household must have called him) show him either in the company of Helga or alone, which means that a family member took the photographs. The one exception is the group photo from West Island in Steinar Brage’s book about the second colony. ‘The Vaccination’ was the title of the chapter in which that photo was included. After paying serious attention to Kaufmann’s diaries, one soon realises that, as far as the children were concerned, the vaccination programme was hardly a matter of innocent inoculations. But if Brage, the author of Memoirs of a Wartime Child, was troubled at all by the treatments children were subjected to in the Sanatorium, he does not deal with that in his book. Despite the misery that dominated most of the country, or perhaps because of it, his summers on the Inner Islands are remembered as times of unclouded happiness:
We were asked to help with cutting and stacking the hay, and with the work on the farm in other ways. But these were no crushing tasks for us, all young, healthy boys. True, some were unused to drinking fresh milk and came out in a rash. But, apart from a few cases of nettle fever, I cannot recall any one of us falling seriously ill. In the afternoons, we divided into teams and played various ball games or had swimming races across Horse Strait. We fell asleep early in the evenings, tired out by the sun and the work and the long swims in the salty sea.
Did Franz Lehman, too, remember his stay on the island as a happy time? Did he return with his wife and two children because he wanted to see his benefactor again and thank him? To me, the whole story remains enigmatic. As does how and why, after spending the war years in the colony, he should have ended up in the USA. Kaufmann can hardly have helped him with that. Perhaps Franz Lehman had family or more distant relatives in the States who were able to help him to emigrate after the end of the war. What happened afterwards is easier to establish. Although I never met my father when I went to the United States, and still do not even know if he is alive or dead, I have unearthed plenty of evidence of the ambition and decisiveness he showed as an immigrant. After cutting short his medical studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, his first aim was to be recruited to the US Marines. Although he was not accepted, he continued to work in the armed forces. His first job was with the air force, in a section that was to become Aerospace Medicine. At first, he was stationed at the large Wright Patterson Base in Ohio, but he was later transferred to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Following the move to Texas, he volunteered for service in the Korean War. In other words, everything Johannes had told us about Frank Lehman was true: he had completed at least two tours to Korea with the USAF and, during the last of these (it ended in spring 1953), served at the air force base in Suwon, to the south of Seoul. I have no idea of the extent to which his military career affected his civilian life and work, but he changed tack after the war and moved to Pascagoula in Mississippi. By this time, he was already married to the woman who was to be our mother, Elizabeth (née Westwood), and they settled down in Ocean Springs, outside Biloxi. Their address at 2973 Saratoga Drive is the last one I have been able to find. The house is a simple wood-and-brick bungalow on a narrow tree-lined street but does have a double garage and a wide driveway. When I went to see it on a hot, humid morning in July 1988, the house had already changed owner three times, but a neighbour two houses along the street, a man called Donald Shapiro, claimed to remember Frank and his young wife very well. Mr Shapiro used to play tennis with Frank on Sundays, and Frank won almost all the time thanks to his terrifying forehand drive. When I asked Shapiro if he knew where the Lehmans had moved to after Ocean Springs, he just shook his head. Frank had been working on some kind of research project at the Marines’ base in Pascagoula, something to do with pressure equilibration inside advanced diving suits. That was all Frank had ever said. Plenty of hush-hush in the forces, Shapiro said, putting one finger across his lips and smiling cagily. This meant that I could tell Minna, in one of the many letters I wrote to her during my rambling trip around the States, that she had been right: our dad had been a spy, as likely as not. I meant it to sound like a joke but was partly serious because, after his stay in Ocean Springs in between Biloxi and Pascagoula, the trail left by Frank Lehman stops. I have been unable to find out anything about what he did during the few years before he and Elizabeth turn up in the NATO villa on the Inner Islands. What drove him and his wife, who both seemed to be nicely settled in the USA, to move back to the distant place where he had spent several years as a wartime refugee? And why go away again just a few years later, especially in circumstances so urgent and chaotic that they went off without their two children? Did they really intend to leave us for good, or is it true that Frank and Elizabeth Lehman were on board that plane from Copenhagen that crashed so tragically in February 1963? I can still recall Minna and myself running into Mr Carsten on Bird Hill, and what he said about my father: how he was strapped into his seat as he and other passengers were hurled out of the burning fuselage. During the years before my journey to America, I was quite convinced that this part of the story was an invention and that Mr Carsten’s only motive for telling us all that was that he needed to give vent to the inexplicable hatred he felt against our parents. And then, in April 1988, with just a few months to go before leaving for the States, I was gripped by an unexpected and quite unreasonable hope. As one outcome of my digging into every kind of archive, I had come across an article in the Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, published the week after the accident on the Inner Islands. The piece was about a Mr and Mrs Leyman, who had booked tickets for that very plane but missed its departure from Copenhagen because of bad weather delaying the first leg of their long flight from Los Angeles. The Ekstra Bladet reporter had been lucky enough to run into the stranded American couple in the transit hall at Kastrup Copenhagen and chatted to them for long enough to get sufficient material for one of those weren’t-they-lucky-after-all sagas so much loved by newspaper readers everywhere:
The Tempest Page 14