The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  Varian wrote with obvious great affection about Charlie:

  Charlie was a youngster from the South – Georgia, I think – who had been doing ‘art’ work in Paris before the war. I put that word in quotation marks because as far as I could see Charlie’s conception of art consisted of drawings of pretty girls, preferably nude. He had many feminine admirers, and there was always at least one of them in the office as long as he worked for us …

  As a doorman, Charlie had one great drawback. He couldn’t speak anything but English, and most of the refugees didn’t speak any English at all. But his ambulance-driver’s uniform awed the over-insistent ones, and his good nature cheered the depressed among them. If few understood what he said, none disliked him. In fact, I think he was probably the most popular member of the staff.52

  Charlie was an impressive figure in his army greatcoat. Mary Jayne Gold, the young American heiress who bankrolled much of Varian Fry’s work, described her first meeting with him in the Hotel Continental as she made her way down a broad flight of stairs into the hotel lobby late one afternoon:

  up the stairs flapped a large khaki of definite military cut. Inside was a very tall young man with hair of about the same sandy colour as the coat. Another fellow of normal proportions and dress followed him. Instinctively, I retreated a few steps. The tall one introduced himself as Charles Fawcett, then presented his friend, Dick Ball. He glanced around to see if we were out of earshot and made me take a few steps back until I was pressed up against the wall. Leaning beside me as if we were already hiding from the police, he told me he had learned that I had an airplane, so he had come right over. I looked at his well-cut boyish features and curly light hair while he disclosed in a soft Georgia accent that he and his friend wanted to fly to Gibraltar. He was visibly disappointed when I told him that I had left my plane in Paris.53

  She described him as ‘doorman and reception clerk’ at the new office on Rue Grignan. He told her that he kept order when people got ‘nervous’ and then bent over and spoke in a lower tone. ‘I’m really the bouncer just in case anybody gets in there that doesn’t belong.’ He stood up straight ‘and drew his magnificent khaki coat together. “See? It sort of impresses people. I’ve had to cut the brass buttons off – but it still looks official … almost.”’ Mary said, ‘It sure does.’54

  The situation had to be fluid and Charlie wasn’t just a bouncer. In September he and his chum Dick Ball were escorting groups of the younger and more experienced Resistance workers over the low mountains near the coast to the Franco-Spanish border. This became one of the regular escape routes, often led by Lisa and Hans Fittko. According to Varian, at least 100 people were estimated to have escaped that way in the six months that followed.55

  In December 1940 Charlie left Marseilles whilst Varian was in Vichy trying to help those on his list who were trapped in camps. The area of Vichy France contained 120 concentration camps, containing about 60,000 civilian internees, and between 25–35,000 forced labourers and foreign workers, often in appalling conditions. ‘It seemed like the whole of the unoccupied zone was one great, heartless prison.’56

  Charlie had become aware that the police knew of his work for the French Resistance and for security it was time to move on. Varian later described the preparations for Charlie’s departure:

  Charlie had been loaded down with secret papers and reports, including some for the British … Since he was a sculptor they had simply put some of the reports in the heads he had modeled, and Charlie had poured in wet plaster to seal them up. One of the most secret reports, listing the Spanish Republican refugees in hiding in France, and urging visas for them, had gone in to the third valve of Charlie’s trumpet. Charlie had tightened all the valves with a wrench covered with a cloth and had learned a couple of tunes he could play without ever having to use the third valve, in case any questions were asked. Still other reports had been pasted into the rim of his suitcase.57

  He made it over the border, but was closely questioned by the French police. Charlie, ever the enterprising art student, saw a prostitute lounging in the railway station and had the idea of drawing a few pornographic sketches which he distributed through his luggage. As the French police searched his possessions they were side-tracked by these sketches and, in their amusement at what they had discovered, failed to look for any other items and waved him through. As he went through Charles was unsure how to behave.

  I started thinking what is the best thing to pretend – I think a dog with his tail between his legs – I was ashamed. All I wanted to do was jump in there and click my heels. When I got to the door going towards Spain, I looked back and they were passing it round, roaring with laughter.58

  Although he arrived at his Barcelona hotel safely, he was arrested later by the Spanish secret police. They took him back into France and handed him over to the Gestapo in Biarritz – Charlie Fawcett, 21-year-old smuggler of secret papers for the Resistance.59

  Charlie worried, as he sat for hours in a corridor waiting to be interrogated, that the documents he carried could lead to him being executed. Suddenly the door opened and he saw a high-ranking German officer quickly march down the corridor, closely followed by someone who was quite obviously a French informer. Charlie snatched his chance: ‘The Germans were so arrogant, that they couldn’t even bring themselves to look at the people who were collaborating with them.’ He opened the door for the German officer, who of course ignored him. Charlie joined the pair, with his luggage and trumpet; he just tagged behind as though he was part of the group and walked into the street. He walked into the station, boarded a train to Madrid, and the next day he was delivering the papers to the British Embassy military attaché, Colonel William Wyndham Torre – known to his chums as ‘Bunny’.60

  Mary Jayne also reported this story: ‘He was arrested in Spain and released probably because, like me, he had an innocent air about him and kept playing several hastily composed airs so charmingly that not even a trained musician would notice that he never pushed the third valve.’61

  A few days later, while safely in Lisbon waiting for a ship to England, he met one of his wives – Lilian Fawcett. Marriage was one of Charlie’s unique methods of rescuing Jewish women incarcerated in camps:

  As they were going past the Ritz Hotel, the Nazi HQ in Paris, he met a woman he knew whom he suspected of being a collaborator. She asked him if he was still single, which he thought was a bit odd. When he said he was, she asked him to marry a girl in a camp through a French lawyer. In fact, he married 5 girls in the course of about 10 days from French and Dutch camps. The lawyer was in the underground. Two of the wives were Hungarian, one was Polish and one was Bulgarian.

  Charles Fawcett has said of Hitler, some people were glad he never got the atomic bomb. ‘I’m glad he never even got the computer,’ said Charlie, ‘so he could keep track of who was marrying whom. If he had,’ said Fawcett, ‘the Gestapo would have barged in on my second wedding; and not as “best man” either!’62

  Gaston Deferre was a young lawyer who was helping Varian Fry in his rescue work. In the 1980s he became Francois Mitterand’s Minister of the Interior, but one of his strangest tasks must have been helping to organise the papers that enabled Charlie to marry the six Jewish women in concentration camps. Once they were married to an American, they were automatically entitled to leave France with a US visa. Charlie married six women in three months. After the war, Charlie met someone who had worked in the Lisbon Consulate who wondered at the endless stream of ‘Mrs Fawcetts’.63

  Lilian Fawcett was an opera singer, the daughter of a famous Hungarian conductor Dr Alfred Sendrey. When Charlie saw the poster with her name on it in Lisbon:

  Charles wondered, on a long shot, if it might be one of his many cousins from the South. He went to the theatre the following evening where a beautiful woman with a superb voice sang popular operatic arias. Charles went backstage to ‘try his luck’. The beautiful creature took one look at him and gasped with emotion – she was one
of the women he had married in order to rescue from the camps, now fully restored to health and with a full head of hair. This resulted in the only honeymoon he had with any of them – consummated on the observation car of a train speeding through the stormy night en route for Oporto.64

  Charles only met two of ‘his wives’ in person as they were paper marriages. He met the other one later in Israel when he was the guest of Shimon Peres. However, he did hear that two of them had turned up at the same time in Lisbon and the Ambassador to Portugal’s wife, Mrs Herbert Pell, helped Charlie at that time: ‘She thought it was very romantic.’65

  Charles always stressed that it was Varian Fry who inspired him – ‘Varian Fry was completely idealistic and courageous – inspired us all’.66 In April 1991 Varian Fry was honoured by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and a book of tributes was written by his Marseilles colleagues. Charles Fawcett wrote how Varian had inspired them all, even occasionally encouraging some Gestapo agents to turn a blind eye. The poet Walter Mehring, who had written anti-Nazi poetry and had ten of his books publicly burnt, joined Varian’s group and said: ‘It gives you hope … courage … just to be with him. I was scared to death half the time. I can truthfully say that I did not do anything out of courage. I did it because I was ashamed to let Fry down.’67 Charlie always said he was only a gofer; he concluded: ‘A brave man is one who realises the danger, fears it, but does not let it prevent him from doing what he has to do. Varian knew. But he did it.’68 April Fawcett has revealed since Charlie died: ‘Varian and Charlie were petrified the whole time they were in Marseilles as it was so incredibly dangerous for them, even though they were not Jewish, and their lives were very much at risk.’69

  Charles Fawcett was a rescuer who helped people all his life. In 1945 he fought with the French Foreign Legion in Alsace and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, he fought with Greek partisans against invading communists 1947–48, in 1956 he helped Hungarian refugees escape into Austria, four years later he was rescuing refugees from the Belgian Congo with a friend who had a plane70 and in 1979 he went to Afghanistan to help the Afghans fight the Soviet invaders.71 He was involved there through most of the 1980s and when he died Lord Salisbury wrote to April praising Charles’ influence on world events at that time.72

  Charlie suffered from tuberculosis all his life which caused him to spend considerable time in hospital. He never allowed the disease to stop his courageous adventures which were interwoven with his very full film career. He made 100 plus films over a 25-year period, appearing twice with Sophia Loren; he knew Orson Welles and William Holden, and in Rome, where in the 1960s he was known as the ‘Mayor of Via Veneto’, he is alleged to have been Hedy Lamarr’s lover.73

  In January 2006 Charles and April were present at the National Holocaust Memorial Day event in Cardiff, where Charlie’s courage was honoured and they were introduced to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife Cherie (see plate 3). Tony Blair also wrote to April when Charlie died, praising his courage and saying what an honour it had been to meet him.74

  Helen Hortense, Charlie’s mother, would have been gratified to know how well her request had been followed. Charlie was certainly brought up to ‘mind’ and he did so all his life with the world as his concern. When he died in February 2008, aged 92, he had lived a truly full and remarkable life. His personal charm stayed with him to the end and I am proud to have known him.

  Carl Lutz (1895–1975) was born on 30 March 1895, the ninth child of Johannes and Ursula Lutz. Christened Karl Friedrich, he called himself Charles when he was in America, and later in Palestine he became Carl. His father owned a sandstone quarry just below where they lived in Walzenhausen, in north-eastern Switzerland. He was brought up as a Methodist. His mother was very devout and an active teacher at the local Sunday school. She was a very strong influence on him all his life. When he found himself in the dilemma of trying to save the Jews of Budapest, he prayed to God and decided God had sent him this mission.75 Although he brought his stepdaughter Agnes up as a Methodist, she says that he lost faith and became distanced from the religion. It has been stressed that his mother was no religious bigot:

  She insisted that they finish school and learn a trade, so that they would not have to depend on others. Reflecting on the poverty of the Appenzell hill country, she would admonish her offspring that it was more important to help those in need than to always run to prayer meetings. Her pietism was combined with a spirit of social protest against the ‘higher ups’ who allowed injustices to subvert what had been a democratic way of life.76

  Johannes died of TB in 1909 when Carl was 14. Carl was not a bookish child and left school aged 15 to become an apprentice in a textile mill in the next village. As a young man of 18, in 1913, Carl Lutz left Switzerland to emigrate to the United States. Four years later, when America mobilised for the First World War, he did not wish to be called up and became a fugitive for three months evading the recruiting agents. ‘He wrote later that when he looked into the faces of Budapest Jews nearly thirty years later, he knew what it meant to be trapped.’77

  From 1918–20 he studied at the Methodist Central Wesleyan College in central Missouri, but he soon became bored with the limited scope of the ‘prairie college’ and in 1920 he left and joined the staff of the Swiss legation in Washington DC. He had embarked on his diplomatic career. At 29 he was ready to return to Europe, but fate kept him in America and in 1934 he met his first wife Gertrud. After a traumatic courtship they were married in January 1935, and were due to settle in London when an emergency caused the Swiss Foreign Ministry to send him to Jaffa in Palestine on the very evening of their wedding:

  Curiously, shortly before they parted, at the end of the wedding reception, Ursula slipped a piece of paper into her son’s hand. She was now in her eighties, and her handwriting was becoming shaky. She had written a passage from the prophet Isaiah: ‘And he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.’ Perhaps his mother had a presentiment.78

  Gertrud and Carl loved their time in the Holy Land and travelled extensively in their first year there. However, in 1936 trouble erupted and in Arab Jaffa, where they lived, they were often taken for Jews. One day they were both trapped in their apartment whilst they watched an unarmed Jewish worker being lynched by an Arab crowd. They were too frightened to come out to try to save him. They felt traumatised by their failure to save the man and the brutality of the attack: ‘During the same period Lutz heard tales of Nazi horrors from newly arrived German Jews. Why was the supposedly enlightened twentieth century falling into such unspeakable brutality? His sympathy swung over to the Jews.’79

  It was Moshe Krausz, head of the Palestine Office in Budapest and responsible for distributing ‘the few legal certificates for Palestine that the JA [Jewish Agency] managed to send to Budapest prior to the German occupation’,80 who initially managed to persuade Vice-Consul Carl Lutz to issue protective documents or Schutzpass (see plate 8). It was also Krausz who used 7,800 supposed individual exit permits to save 7,800 families – about 40,000 people. These documents were later copied by Raoul Wallenberg for the Swedes, and by other neutral nations for smaller numbers of Jews. In fact, there was no emigration but the idea of issuing protective documents was recognised as a way of saving large numbers of Jews in Budapest.81 However, it must be remembered that it was Carl Lutz who initiated this policy in Budapest.

  As a committed Christian, he really struggled with the situation he found in Budapest. The Hungarian government had initiated its own anti-Semitic legislation even prior to the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Men like my father were recruited for forced labour from March 1942. As early as 1920 the government had introduced Law XXV, which imposed the ‘numerus clausus’ on the universities which restricted Jews to 6 per cent of the student body. It is mentioned in the obituary of the late Professor Tibor Barna, who came to Manchester in 1937, that ‘one of the benefits of a foreign university was the chance to escape the institutionalised ant
i-Semitism of pre-war Hungary, which imposed a quota on the number of Jews going to university’.82

  The local Protestants were no help. Laszlo Ravasz was a bishop in the Hungarian Reformed Church and a keen Magyar nationalist. As early as 1938, as a member of the Upper House of Parliament, he had voted in favour of anti-Jewish measures. His sermons were broadcast weekly and always contained an anti-Semitic statement, either referring to Jews as having killed Christ or refusing to accept him as the Messiah:

  Moreover, the bishop broadcast that the Jews were strangers to Hungarian society, and that they dominated the nation’s economy and the liberal professions far beyond their true number. There was nothing in all this which was not being said by others. But the radio sermons of Ravasz, which came on the air week after week, year after year, helped to transform ordinary anti-Jewish popular prejudice into theologically and intellectually acceptable anti-semitism.83

  His influence was both great, as Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, was a member of his parish, and catastrophic:

  Without realizing it, during the fatal pre-war years, Ravasz helped to remove the intellectual barriers against the physical elimination of the Jews. If Ravasz and some of the other church leaders had followed the example of the German Confessing Church and of other religious resistance movements in Nazi-dominated parts of Europe, the record of Hungarian Christianity and perhaps of the Hungarian nation during World War II might have been different.84