The Baroness

by Hannah Rothschild

  Since her return from America, Liberty had grown terribly thin and more nervous, even given the care she was receiving from Dr. Freudenberger. “Dr. F telephones that all is going well with Liberty. She does not worry over much and her spirits are not bad at all,” Rozsika wrote in a letter to her sister.

  The postal service, surprisingly, worked well and letters from the cousins were safely delivered across the continent. Family correspondence reported that the spring and summer of 1940 were again beautiful, the gardens at Ashton bursting with lilac and laburnum, and the village hedgerows animated by dragonflies and butterflies. French cousins used the house as a staging post between Europe and America. Rozsika wrote to her sister, who was trapped in Hungary:

  If you could get a magic carpet here, you would find lovely summer days, millions of roses and most delicious huge strawberries, an abundance of vegetables even though several of our gardeners have been called up. There is no shortage of any food, we get all the meat and fish we want and have also got sugar for making jams of the soft fruits. I have bought a Frigidaire, which can make 18lbs of ice daily and besides plenty of room for keeping food.

  Yet Nica was allowed to stay at Ashton for only a short time. While there, her children Patrick and Janka played with my father and aunt, who had been left in this safe haven with their grandmother. Rozsika wrote, “The children [my father Jacob and his sister Sarah] have a pony cart. They are as brown as berries as they run about all day practically without any clothes.”

  News reached Jules that the German Army had ransacked Château d’Abondant and only Nica’s dogs were left. “Alas last Tuesday,” Rozsika wrote, “Nica and the children left for Canada. It was the wish of Jules who told her that for his sake and his peace of mind she must take the children overseas. She would have preferred to leave them with me and be near Jules but I think Jules has to be considered while he is fighting for his country since the first day of the war. Nica looked quite beautiful and saw all her friends in London and Miriam helped her to get off.”

  I read and reread this letter, trying to decipher what was really going on. Again Jules’s wishes were paramount: Nica had to leave behind her country of birth and her family against her will for “his sake and his peace of mind.” She did her bit, which was to obey and look beautiful. The voyage across the Atlantic was perilous, with the boat narrowly escaping aerial bombardment. The American writer Virginia Cowles, who made the transatlantic crossing with Nica’s cousins, complained that their staple diet of caviar and foie gras was not very filling.

  Nica was twenty-seven but still felt bound to follow her husband’s instructions. Arriving in America, she received a cable, informing her that Rozsika had died on June 30, 1940, of a heart attack. Stuck on the far side of the Atlantic, she was unable to attend her mother’s funeral. Settling her children with family friends, the Guggenheims, on their eighty-acre estate on Long Island, Nica returned to England. This was not an unusual decision at the time: my mother and her sister, aged four and two, were sent alone to America in 1940 to live with acquaintances to await the end of the war. What seems heartless now was normal then. For a time Nica worked as a volunteer but, without the presence of her husband or her mother, with Victor and Miriam away from home on war work, and her children thousands of miles away, she felt purposeless and lost.

  Nica, who had married a Frenchman with a suspiciously Germanic-sounding name, had little chance of being accepted by the British Army. She could, like many of her relations, have stayed in New York or found some kind of work in England as part of the war effort. However, determined to play an active front-line role in the conflict, she decided to join the Free French Army in the hope that she would be able to fight alongside her husband.

  * * *

  *To this day Eric de Rothschild refuses to rip out the line of showers the German officers installed in his chateau to serve as a reminder of what could have happened.

  12 • Pistol-Packing Mama

  Nica was not the only Rothschild woman to join the Free French Army. In response to a call from de Gaulle, her cousins Monique and Nadine also came to London to volunteer. “The atmosphere of the capital fascinated me,” Monique wrote in her privately published memoir. “It thronged constantly with soldiers of all ranks and all nationalities. At night, the underground was transformed into a huge dormitory; the English were endlessly patient, discreet and determined.”

  The life of a new female conscript, as Monique de Rothschild said, was in complete contrast to that of a chatelaine:

  06h 30 Get up, wash, [do] hair, make beds, put on uniform.

  07h 30 Breakfast

  08h 30 Drill (Exercise)

  09h 30 Military training

  12h 30 Lunch then free time

  14h 30 Military Training

  16h 00 Drill

  17h 00 Driving instruction 18h 30 Dinner 21h 00 Lights out

  The young Rothschild women presented themselves to General Koenig at Grosvenor Square. The commander was curt, informing them that, although their duties included acting as his chauffeur, he hated being driven by women. Hearing that Jules had joined the Allied offensive against the Germans in Africa, Nica begged to be sent out to join her husband and see some action, but was told there was absolutely no chance. All enlisted women had to remain in London. Nica decided to smuggle herself out there anyway. She did not let the general’s orders to stay in England nor her own lack of military training get in the way of adventure or blunt her sense of purpose: in December 1940 she found a berth on a Norwegian freighter carrying supplies to West Africa. Her only preparation for life so far had been dancing lessons and being brave on the hunting field. With no means of self-defence and no idea how to survive in a hostile climate, she had little chance of reaching Jules alive.

  Fellow members of the Free French Army included Marcel Marceau, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a young soldier, Gaston Eve, who, between 1941 and 1943, kept an evocative diary of life in Africa with his unit. He described conditions in a typical French garrison: “I have never again seen a camp so filthy. I had the bad luck of acquiring dysentery only 48 hours after my arrival, even though I had taken care to do as I was advised at night. We were told to wrap a long strip of fabric around our belly; [dysentery] was not a rare thing in Africa.”

  Gaston Eve tells us all about the life of the new volunteers as they made their way across Africa. In Bangui, lions walked freely up the High Street. In Brazzaville, which had a significant European population, the food was rather good but for the rest of the time they lived off a diet of tinned corned beef. At Fort Archambault, they swam in the river, keeping an eye out for crocodiles. At night they were bitten by mosquitoes and attacked by ferocious black ants. In Kano, the Emir, whose teeth were filed into tiny sharp points, met the battalions with a display of his soldiers on dancing horses.

  Nica ignored all the medical warnings. Within weeks of arriving in Africa she contracted malaria, got sunstroke and narrowly escaped death in a car crash for which she was solely responsible; she spent several weeks recovering in a field hospital. However, she did find Jules. Once her husband and his commanding officer got over the shock of her unexpected arrival and her audacity, Nica was given work as a decoder and a driver. She also had her own radio program on which she punctuated anti-Nazi and Vichy government propaganda with favorite new jazz records. Rumour has it that she flew Lancaster bombers as well, but I have not yet been able to prove this.

  There were few married couples in the army so Nica and Jules were often billeted apart at night, but were able, battles permitting, to meet in the daytime. As a woman, Nica was actively discouraged from taking part in direct fighting but, in the mayhem of war, rules rarely contained her.

  Tracing Nica’s movements during this period is difficult. According to an article in the New York Times, she narrowly escaped being torpedoed en route from Lagos to New York in January 1942. I can only assume that she made the journey to America to see her children, who were still living outside the ci
ty. Her visit coincided with the première of Duke Ellington’s jazz symphony Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943. This piece of music would, she claimed, one day act as a calling.

  Although New York was exciting, Nica missed Jules and was keen to follow him, even onto the battlefields. She smuggled herself back to Africa on a supply plane. In his memoir, which reads at times like a travelogue, Jules describes getting hold of a rickety old plane to travel between the Free French bases, enabling the couple to explore parts of Africa normally inaccessible to tourists, taking off and landing on scrubland or in clearings. En route between Brazzaville and Bangui, for example, they swooped down in the middle of a forest. There they met a pygmy tribe who explained that, to be considered a true hunter, a man had to kill an elephant by sliding under its belly, slitting it with a long knife and quickly getting out of the way before the beast crushed its assailant to death. Another escapade placed them in Fort Lamy in Chad, where they got a lift from a man who was on his way to market to exchange his wife for some dogs.

  In September 1943 the couple arrived in Cairo. Jules was immediately sent to Tunis; the Battle of Tunisia had lasted from November 17, 1942, to May 13, 1943. The Axis had been defeated, but the Allies needed to consolidate their position in Africa. Jules played a key part in this as a major and second-in-command of the 1er Battaillon de Fusiliers Marins. His division crossed the Mareth Line, joining the Allies in Triaga. The 90th Light Infantry German Division was holed up in the massif of Zaghouan. After a bitter battle on May 13, victory fell to the Allies, but half of Jules’s battalion was killed. With only three hundred men remaining, Jules was put in charge of thousands of German and Italian prisoners.

  Nica followed her husband Jules to Africa and enlisted in the Free French Army. (Photographic Credit 12.1)

  Nica formed part of the back-up group who stayed in Cairo to help organise supplies and equipment. Cairo then was Africa’s answer to New York: a cool multicultural scene and a stopping-off place for every decorated soldier or in-demand movie star—all the beautiful and the damned. In 1943, Vivien Leigh and Noël Coward were appearing there on stage; Gavin Astor was there too, accompanying Josephine Baker; Nica’s old friend Winston Churchill was in town; the King of Egypt held nightly parties; there were two jazz clubs; and a new film, Arsenic and Old Lace, was showing at the picture house.

  The author and critic Stanley Crouch was one of three interviewees to tell me the following story. An African-American soldier billeted in a Cairo hotel heard the most wonderful music coming from a gramophone in a room down the hall. The soldier, who also happened to be a musician, couldn’t resist knocking on the door and was astonished when a beautiful woman with long dark hair opened it and invited him in. It was Nica and it appears that she seduced him. The only detail that changed in each of the three versions was the name of the musician. With all parties now dead, there is no way of proving or disproving the truth of it. War created different rules, normal behaviour was skewed, and people stepped out of character. Some will consider this typical of Nica, assuming that she was promiscuous. My hunch is that she was motivated by romantic rather than carnal love.

  What of Nica’s relationship with her husband at this time? The very personality traits that had profoundly irritated Nica in peacetime became badges of honour during the war. Being decisive, brave and dictatorial were essential qualifications for a military leader. By following her husband to Africa, Nica saw Jules at his best and possibly at his happiest and most fulfilled.

  Reading Jules’s memoirs gives another, more chilling insight into his character and modus operandi. If one of his men committed a serious fault, Jules had him dragged in front of the whole troop and beaten up by a colleague, who happened to be a professional boxer. Jules thought this a more effective and instantaneous way of keeping control than referring the incident to a court martial. He described these methods as “paternal but strict.”

  No sooner had Nica got to Tunis than the soldiers were, once again, on the move, this time heading back to Tripoli and on to Algeria. Water was rationed to four and a half litres per person per day, just enough to prevent serious dehydration but not enough for comfort. For safety, it had to be boiled and served as tea, but most of the men had terrible dysentery and stomach pains. The dogs became so used to drinking shaving water that, following the war, they refused to touch anything without a soapy smell.

  In April 1944, Jules’s regiment, accompanied by Nica, began the journey from Bizerte to Naples and then on to Caserta, where Nica worked for the War Graves Commission, a post that involved identifying the bodies of dead soldiers left on the battlefields of Europe. It was a macabre and distressing job, following her husband’s regiment as they battled across Europe, fighting their way to victory. In one bloody battle at Garigliano, the Germans, who occupied the hilltop position and the main road, should have won. Jules narrowly avoided death when a mortar exploded ten centimetres away from his head, knocking him unconscious and rendering him temporarily blind and deaf. Bit by bit, the Allies edged forwards, snatching tiny victories. Crossing the Gustav Line and then Pontecorvo on May 23, the Germans were pushed north. Jules’s battalion made its way to Brindisi to take a boat to the South of France, where it would join the offensive sweeping through France. After taking in the liberation of Lyons in September and Ronchamps in October, they marched north through the Alps in heavy snow towards Turin in the early months of 1945.

  Following the liberation of Paris in August 1944, Nica based herself in the capital, either at her husband’s family home or the Rothschild house on Avenue Marigny, where her brother Victor was living while working for MI5. Malcolm Muggeridge painted a damning portrait of Victor in his memoir Chronicles of Wasted Time. This description contains clues that may explain why Nica decided eventually to opt out of Rothschild life:

  For Rothschild himself, of course, the Avenue Marigny house was a home from home, but at the same time, I felt, a prison. Installed there, he was de facto if not de jure head of the family. Other Rothschilds appeared from time to time, and offered obeisance. He both liked to feel they were looking to him, and abhorred their presence: his disposition was a curious, uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence. Somewhere between White’s Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between Old and New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering about ever since. Embedded deep down in him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times loveable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent.

  In her interview with the jazz critic and historian Nat Hentoff, Nica kept her recollections of the war short: “I fought from Brazzaville to Cairo, from Tunis to Turkey and even got to Germany to see the last days of the Reich.” Another person I interviewed—Frank Richardson, an American boogie-woogie-playing jeep driver—shone more light on this period. During the war his company was stationed in Paris and he was one of four soldiers billeted at the de Koenigswarter house. There he met Nica and her sister-in-law Odile, who was much younger than Jules, her brother.

  “There were four men quartered in our room and an upright piano,” he told me. “I was playing it one night and there was a knock on the door and Nica came in and introduced herself and asked if I’d like to come downstairs and play for her. She had a grand piano, of course.” Nica wasn’t working at the time and Jules was away fighting. Although provisions were short, the de Koenigswarter house was warm and the two women, aided by the troops, were able to lay their hands on most supplies. Richardson clearly had a soft spot for Odile, who was nearer his own age than Nica. He told me, “She was rather dashing; Django Reinhardt played at her birthday party and she wore white gloves up to her elbows.”

  On another occasion in late 1944, Richardson remembered the Baroness knocking on his door and asking if he would play for her and a friend. “The other man
was introduced as one of General de Gaulle’s aides. So the three of us were there, I played the piano and they were sort of smooching, and then they went a little bit further and then further still. I thought I’d better go back upstairs.”

  I asked Frank if he was shocked by their behaviour.

  “Well, yes! My background being from a small town, and only twenty-one years old and not a man of the world, it shocked me.” But then he paused and added, “It was wartime, I guess.”

  There were few moments to really relax. Each battle brought news of the felling of friends. While the end of the war saw victory for the Allies, it also revealed the full horror of the Nazi regime. Having connections to privileged relations did not help everyone.

  After the war, a tragic eyewitness account came to light of the fate of Nica’s maternal aunt, Aranka von Wertheimstein. A Hungarian friend of the family had received a letter from an acquaintance, a Mr. Racz, who happened to be on a death train with Aranka. The old lady was by then eighty, nearly blind and terrified. She had never married and worked on a farm near Rozsika’s former family home.

  On May 1st [1944], all Jews, including Miss Wertheimstein, were rounded up and put into a ghetto. They were kept there under awful conditions until May 28th, 1944, when they were forced into railway trucks (seventy-five in one wagon). The journey, a nightmare, lasted four days. No water, no food. Many women lost consciousness, some died, some became insane. On the fourth day I managed to obtain some water and gave some to Miss Wertheimstein who was in a bad state. After she [had] drunk and recovered she told me that she feared she would not live long and to try and have this letter conveyed somehow to the Rothschild family in London. When the train stopped at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the SS guards were waiting there with sticks and truncheons. I saw Miss W pulled out of the wagon by an SS guard using a hooked stick. She fell forward onto the rails and was beaten to death on the spot.