Rozsika, Aranka and Charlotte von Wertheimstein in 1899. Aranka was beaten to death by station guards on arrival at Auschwitz in May 1944. (Photographic Credit 12.2)
On May 8, 1945, Winston Churchill announced the end of the war, but although hostilities ceased, the repercussions had only just begun. Countries, families, lives, dreams and futures lay in tatters. Survivors had to reconstruct a life out of debris and desolation. The way of life that had been shaken by the First World War was shattered by the Second.
Nica and Jules were decorated for their efforts. Jules was awarded the rare distinction of the Ordre de la Libération: the second highest honour in France, bestowed on heroes of the French liberation during the Second World War. The few foreigners who received it included Winston Churchill and General Dwight Eisenhower. Nica was also decorated for her war services and made a lieutenant.
The couple faced an uncertain future. Their children were still in America. Nica’s mother had died. Victor’s marriage was floundering. Liberty’s health was deteriorating. Only Miriam, newly married and settled at Ashton Wold, seemed purposeful and happy.
For Nica, the war was a turning point. Finally, aged thirty-two, she had been set free and shown another way to live.
13 • Take the A-Train
Two photographs of Nica taken after the war reveal a sad and remote-looking woman. The first, shot in Norway, shows her behind the wheel of a large Rolls-Royce, staring blankly at the photographer. She looks beautiful in crisp white linen, her hair and make-up perfect, but while the child and servant with her are beaming at the camera, my great-aunt’s expression is fixed, resigned. Another picture taken on a pebbly beach a few years later should, like many of its kind, radiate with the joy of a holiday or a day out at the seaside. In the background there are beach huts and, in the foreground, Nica sits in an exquisite trouser suit, with two of her children, looking elegant and soignée. But again the crackling energy and intensity, the joie de vivre so evident in portraits of the young Nica, have gone.
For Nica, as for many of her contemporaries, the war offered women personal liberation as well as a chance to prove their worth outside the home. Some went out to work for the first time and, with their husbands away, had the opportunity to run their households, budgets and businesses alone. Nica had distinguished herself without the aid of servants, helpers and family. Brought up to believe that the simplest domestic duties should be done by others had been both spoiling and strangely disabling. Nica and her siblings had been pampered to the point of infantilism. As Miriam said, “We had no idea how to do anything for ourselves.”
In peacetime, Nica’s marriage was, in effect, a carbon copy of her childhood. As a married woman she was there to entertain, to inform and to breed. There was a temporary suspension of duties during the conflict but now she was expected to snap back into an uxorial role. Years earlier, a Rothschild cousin had warned her, “I should imagine you will soon get married—so you should learn as soon as possible that you are a worm. A woman to be a successful wife must be a worm.”*
Nica was not worm material. Furthermore, the war had given her confidence, plus the opportunity to think, to act and to be herself. She had managed, alone, to get her children to safety from France to America; she had survived torpedoes and malaria, and had smuggled herself across continents. At various times, the Free French had employed her as a decoder, a driver and a broadcaster, and at the end of the war she had been decorated by a foreign army. Slipping back into domestic life, even a uniquely privileged and comfortable one, was never going to be easy.
Peace also created a vacuum of purpose for Jules. Life in the army suited him; peacetime meant sudden unemployment. Their home at Château d’Abondant had been destroyed by Nazi troops and was uninhabitable, while they themselves no longer had the money to live in prewar style. Since no one wanted a house on such a vast scale, it sat empty in the French countryside like a great white elephant. The family relocated to Paris, where Jules found work as the general secretary of the Free French Association and was placed in charge of stage-managing morale-boosting events. On one occasion he persuaded the French soprano Lily Pons to give a recital. Another time, surrounding the Opéra with tanks, he organised a march-past by Resistance fighters. When she heard that her husband was in charge of a huge festival of music in the capital, Nica’s spirits rose, to fall swiftly on learning that only military bands qualified for inclusion. She hated marching bands, finding their style of playing too regimented and controlled. “The reason my marriage broke up,” Nica told Esquire magazine, was “that my husband liked drum music and used to break my records if I was late for dinner. I was frequently late for dinner.” In an interview with a Philippine newspaper, her son Patrick confirmed her story: “My father had no particular interest in the subjects that fascinated her: art and music. He would quip that these were not serious matters.”
Nica was the beneficiary of a trust fund based in Britain. The principal, in a stable economic climate, could generate a healthy income but following the war, with taxation levelled up to 83 per cent, Nica faced relative economic hardship for the first time in her life. Even the Rothschild family could not afford to re-create their pre-war standard of living. They did not feel self-pity, knowing they were still very fortunate compared to most. Nevertheless it was a shock, particularly for a woman who had not been prepared, either by family culture or education, to find employment outside the home or to attempt to create a fulfilling role within it.
The French Rothschilds’ assets had been seized first by the Nazis and then by the Vichy French, claiming that any Frenchman who removed himself from his native country had forfeited his right to his own property. An inventory† of the artworks stolen from prominent Jewish families at 203 locations up to July 13, 1944, reads as follows:
1. Rothschild, 3,978 inventory entries
2. Kahn, 1,202 inventory entries
3. David Weill, 1,121 inventory entries
4. Levy de Venzionn, 989 inventory entries
5. Seligmann Brothers, 556 inventory entries
It took the family many years to get even a fraction of their belongings returned. By then the bottom had fallen out of the art market and the once-priceless treasures were greatly reduced in value. Not all their artworks survived. Many are still missing, while some were destroyed.
One picture that survived did so thanks to an extraordinary, reckless act of bravery. When the Nazis took over Château Mouton Rothschild in Bordeaux, they secured the cellars but used the family portraits for target practice. In the middle of a “shoot,” the family cook, a woman who had worked for Philippe de Rothschild for many years, marched out in front of the officers while they were firing, took her employer’s picture off the wall, tucked it under her arm and left the chateau. She came back (with the painting) only when Philippe returned to his home in 1946.
American troops holding paintings confiscated from Jews during the war; 3,978 works of art were stolen from the Rothschild family alone. (Photographic Credit 13.1)
In England, the great Rothschild fortune had crumbled, a casualty of war and the breakdown of family ties. Halton House, which belonged to Alfred, was sold to the RAF; Anthony’s house, Aston Clinton, was turned into a hotel while Tring Park, Nica’s childhood house, became a school for the performing arts. Waddesdon was taken back by the family for thirteen years before being given, like Ascott House, to the National Trust. Only the house belonging to my namesake Hannah de Rothschild, Mentmore Towers, was lived in by her descendants the Roseberys until the 1970s. At the time of Nica’s birth the Rothschilds had owned over forty stately homes across England and Europe. Today only Waddesdon, owned by the National Trust, has its original collection intact.
The war had also destroyed the Rothschilds’ way of living. Their stronghold in the Vale of Aylesbury was at an end, as were the weekends spent at one another’s houses; the system of interdependence was gone. Victor was a new kind of family leader who had eschewed his inheritance, disposin
g of the goods and chattels that his forebears had so carefully accrued. For Victor, if something did not interest him or fit into his way of life, it had no value.
Victor used to say that for every Rothschild who made money, there were a dozen who spent it and that certainly included him. He inherited a family fortune of £2.5 million as well as houses in Piccadilly and Tring, plus an enormous art collection. He left a net estate of £270,410, having dissipated most of his inheritance. Showing no interest in, or aptitude for, trying to rebuild the British bank’s fortunes, in 1949 Victor accepted a post from the Labour government that he held for ten years as chairman of the Agricultural Research Council. He continued his research at the department of zoology in Cambridge, where he devoted himself to the subject of gametology: the study of sperm, eggs and fertilisation. Having scant regard for the past, he knocked down the existing cottages at Rushbrooke in Suffolk to build a model eco-village with identical housing for all the workers on the estate.
Tired of organising victory parades, Jules applied for a position in the French Foreign Office. He was accepted and, on their way to his first posting as Ambassador to Norway in 1947, he and Nica were reunited with their two elder children and his son Louis. Jules had not seen them for five years, Nica for more than three.
Despite their reduced economic circumstances, the couple still entertained notions of grandeur and looked for a suitably magnificent abode. Nevertheless, their decision to set up house in Gimle Castle in Oslo was extraordinary; it had belonged to the convicted Nazi Vidkun Quisling, who was often referred to as Norway’s Hitler. Executed in October 1945 by firing squad following his conviction for high treason for having mounted a coup d’état in April 1940, Quisling was guilty of other crimes including encouraging Norwegians to serve in the Nordic division of the SS and assisting in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Why the de Koenigswarters would want to live in a place redolent of so many appalling memories is not clear.‡ Jules, who boasted that its grand façade dominated the entire fjord, took pleasure in the fact that its sitting room could accommodate a hundred guests and its dining table could seat sixty.
Gimle Castle in Oslo was Nica and Jules’s home during his posting as French Ambassador to Norway in 1947. (Photographic Credit 13.2)
For Jules, the post of ambassador was a way of supporting his family while continuing to represent his country. Nica hated it. A childhood friend of the couple’s eldest son, Patrick de Koenigswarter, remembers the boy singing “Don’t Fence Me In” and running in and out of Nica’s room while his mother lay in bed most of the time, looking glamorous, framed by long dark hair.
Diplomatic life offered Jules a wonderfully ordered existence with clear-cut rules and established protocol. As an ambassador he wielded power and influence over his embassy and could affect foreign policy in the region. For the “Commander-in-Chief,” it was perfect. Norway represented something of a diplomatic wilderness in comparison to the major prizes such as Washington, London or Berlin, but in the aftermath of the war every embassy had a role to play and any posting could lead, potentially, to a more significant one after a few years.
The role of an ambassador’s wife was entirely separate, as Marilyn Pifer, wife of Steven Pifer, U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, explained in an interview some years later. “I expected that the ‘wife of’ role would involve finding a balance between two opposing perceptions: Embassy Morale Officer, helping set the tone for the community, and Most Despised Person in the Embassy, an authority figure who must be obeyed, but who has no real authority at all, and whose requests are therefore all unreasonable.” An ambassador’s wife’s main concern was with protocol, making sure people sat in the right places or that their name cards had the right title. They had to see that visiting dignitaries were fed the right food and were addressed in the right way. Above all, they had to be a blank but magnificent canvas, reflecting the good works of their spouse and the ideals of their country, not an ideal role for Nica at this point.
Some elements of the marriage worked: the couple had another three children after the war—Berit in 1946, Shaun in 1948 and Kari in 1950. They continued to travel and explore foreign cities. Both were party-loving social animals. Marriages rarely collapse over one incident; rather it is a steady accumulation, a layering of individual instances and incompatibilities that create a fault line, an accident waiting to happen.
One incident from Jules’s memoir seems to epitomise his character and their incompatibility. The couple entertained frequently, giving dinners for up to sixty guests at the long dining-room table in the banqueting hall. According to the social protocol of the time, once the pudding course was finished, ladies were expected to leave the dining room immediately so that their husbands and partners could talk and smoke freely. It was the role of the hostess to lead her female guests out of the room. Nica, according to Jules, often forgot to leave the table so, to remind her, he installed a light bulb in front of her seat, which he could operate from his chair. Once the last plate was cleared, Jules would flick the switch on and off. The naked bulb in full view of Nica flashed insistently until she rose and left the room.
Their son Patrick admitted, “My father was a very controlling person. He reminded my mother of her own domineering mother. He was adamant about punctuality, while Nica was notorious for being late. She missed appointments, sometimes by days, and was constantly missing planes.”
Nica was headstrong and wilful. To hear the word “no” was a rarity rather than the norm during her childhood. She had disobeyed her mother to flit off with Jules before they were married and she had completely ignored General Koenig’s orders to stay in England. Now she was being asked to live a life that had become anathema to her. Cut off from her friends, her extended family and the music scene, Nica was stranded in a sea of rules and regulations. She had borne five children but never seemed to find comfort in motherhood. Perhaps she never tried; perhaps she just accepted that child-rearing was best left to the professionals. Perhaps, if war had not broken out, if she had not had that heady glimpse of freedom, she might have stayed with her husband, albeit resentfully.
There was another factor that contributed to the breakdown of her marriage. Nica knew that to ossify in a particular situation, to carry on because that was what others expected, led to dire personal consequences. She had watched her father try to become someone else and live at odds with his personality, against the grain of his passions; she had also witnessed the tragic outcome.
Nica had moved with Jules from London to Paris to Africa and then to Norway. Two years after his posting to Oslo, Jules’s job took the family to Mexico. Nica hoped that being in North America would bring her closer to her kind of civilisation, and she found more excuses to visit New York. Increasingly unhappy and desperate, she was looking for a way out.
* * *
*This came from the distinguished chatelaine of Waddesdon Manor, the author, benefactress and indefatigable charity worker Mrs. James de Rothschild.
†Papers left by Field Marshal Keitel, Commander of the German Armed Forces, and Alfred Rosenberg, Custodian of the Arts.
‡Gimle Castle has since been renamed the Grand Villa and is Norway’s Holocaust Museum.
14 • Black, Brown and Beige
In 2004, I contacted the producer Bruce Ricker to see if, by any chance, he had kept the out-takes of Nica’s interviews for the Thelonius Monk documentary Straight, No Chaser. Nearly forty years had passed since the Blackwood brothers shot the original footage of Nica and Monk, and twenty years had elapsed since Ricker, Clint Eastwood and Charlotte Zwerin had updated the story. It was highly unlikely that any material had survived. Returning to my hotel from a concert late one night in New York, I found a package at reception containing a CD with “Nica” scrawled on it. I put it into a player and suddenly heard Nica. The sound of her booming voice was so unexpected, so immediate, that I expected her ghost to tap my shoulder at any moment. She sounded exactly as I remembered: gravelly and hoarse from
cigarettes, her words punctuated by her inimitable throaty giggle.
The interview was recorded in 1988. Ricker had gone round to Nica’s house in Weehawken to capture her memories of Monk. Hoping to loosen her tongue, he had opened one and then two bottles of wine. Nica drank only tea; Ricker got so drunk that, by the end of the interview, he was hardly coherent, a story he loved to tell against himself. Throughout the interview, Nica is sure about her recollections, even if her dates don’t always match up. She sounds frail and sad as she summons up the past but always uses words succinctly and is quick to reprimand the interviewer for any inaccuracies.
“No, Bruce, that’s not what happened,” she corrects him. “What are you talking about now?” she chides. “Not true,” she reprimands.
Unable to sleep, I whizzed backwards and forwards through the disc, writing notes, trying to fix timelines and readjusting old presumptions. Sitting there until dawn broke, I became ever more excited by this quest. Finally I had answers to some key questions and, bit by bit, a blurry picture was coming into focus.
“Should I tell you that at a certain point in my life I got a call?” Nica’s voice echoed around my room. Then she let out a guffaw of laughter to underline rather than undermine the importance of what she was about to say. Laughter was often used by her generation as an indication that what they were about to tell you was slightly embarrassing but very significant. “A call.” She repeats the word carefully. “I did. I did. Can you imagine such a thing?”
Normally it is holy people who get a calling, a sign or an overwhelming desire to devote the rest of their lives to God. It was hard to imagine Nica, brought up without religion, suddenly getting this message.
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