Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  As the years passed Vera found that Christine had many uses, and the two women became firm friends. “What would I do without my wise owl,” Vera once wrote to her. And Vera had promised to leave Christine and her husband one or two small souvenirs, including a horseshoe she had found at Belsen. The daughter of a south London market trader, Christine loved to collect things. “I found this in a bin bag after Miss Atkins died,” said Christine, producing a horseshoe out of a shoebox. It had a pink ribbon tied round it.

  When, after Vera's death, her possessions and papers were packed up and taken off to Phoebe's shed in Cornwall, Christine had a poke through the rubbish left behind, where she told me she found the horseshoe and other oddments that she decided to salvage and take home. She showed them to me. One item was a book entitled Felbrigg, The Story of a House.

  Christine said she had found some letters and photographs with the book. The pictures showed Vera with a young man; they were certainly taken before the war, as Vera looked to be in her twenties. Vera and the young man were in the mountains. He had fair, wavy hair, looked freckled, and wore a tweed jacket. Vera had on heavy leather ski boots, and wooden skis were leant up against a little hut. She was smiling in a way I had not seen in any other photograph: she looked radiant.

  Then Christine showed me the letters she had found with the book and the photos. The first letter was typed. The sender's address was Headquarters, Royal Air Force, Middle East, and the date was November 8, 1941:

  Dear Miss Atkins,

  A Standing Committee of Adjustment has been set up at this Headquarters to deal with the effects in this country of all missing personnel amongst whom is R.T.W. Ketton-Cremer who was so reported on 31 May 1941. We join you in the hope that he is in fact safe and well. Among his correspondence, which has been forwarded to this Committee, is a letter from which we have taken your address. Further news, when it is received, will be sent to his next of kin. If you wish it to be sent to you also, or if there is anything else that we can do for you, we hope that you will let us know.

  The next letter Christine produced was handwritten, bore the date September 30, 1941, and had been sent from Felbrigg Hall, Roughton, Norwich:

  Dear Miss Atkins,

  Thank you for your letter which I ought to have answered sooner, I'm afraid. I think every possible enquiry about Dick is being made, from a variety of sources in addition to the Air Ministry: and I am afraid there are so few data which could help your brother in Istanbul. But if anything further comes through I will let you know, especially if it is of a nature which would give your brother something to look for. With my many thanks.

  Yours sincerely

  Wyndham Ketton-Cremer.

  From the letter it appeared that Vera had written first to Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who was the brother of Dick, the missing airman. Vera must have suggested that her brother, Ralph, then with an oil company in Istanbul, might be able to help in the search for Dick, but Wyndham Ketton-Cremer had not wished to take up the suggestion. He did not appear to know Vera, and his letter to her seemed somewhat cold.

  I flicked through the guide to Felbrigg Hall. It was written by Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who in the last chapter spoke most movingly of the loss of his younger brother, Dick. Dick loved to fly and had his own plane. On the outbreak of war Dick had joined the RAF hoping to be a pilot, but his poor eyesight prevented him from flying, and instead he became an equipment officer with a bomber squadron and was posted to the Western Desert. “He said goodbye to us in January, and to Jester his large horse, and Mimi his little cat, both of whom were to live with me for many years. We never saw him again,” wrote his brother. It seemed from the book that Dick's fate remained unclear until well after the end of the war.

  Was Dick perhaps the pilot—Vera's “first true love”—whom she met in her Romanian days? His brother wrote in the book: “He spent months—sometimes years—in travel. He went all over the world. A few photograph albums are all that remain of those gay and carefree years.” Or was this pilot, his picture salvaged from a bin, part of a different tale?

  Though I had peered at her many times, I had not expected to find Annie Samuelli. I had peered at Annie in a photograph I had found tucked inside an envelope in Phoebe's shed. Brown with age, it showed a long line of people sitting on what appeared to be mountain ponies on a wooded hillside. On the back was written “1932” and a few names. I assumed it had been taken in Romania, but I didn't know where. I could easily identify Vera, in the middle, wearing jodhpurs and boots with riding crop in hand. According to the list, the man second from Vera on the left was Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the ambassador to Bucharest whom Barbara had heard about. At the other end of the row was a girl with dark hair and the faintest of smiles. Now here she was. Annie Samuelli was the first person I had met who did not just have stories of Vera s distant past but was part of it. Aged ninety-two, Annie was now nearly blind. Sitting in her Paris flat, she adjusted a lamp and also peered at the photograph, trying to think back. At first Annie told me her memory of the prewar years was not good, but after several cups of her favourite Whittards tea, she began to remember more and more.

  Over many hours she recalled Vera at little girls' tea parties at the Bucharest country club and later, as a young woman, at debutante balls, often at the Athénée Palace, the smartest hotel in Bucharest. She remembered that as a young girl Vera was “very calm, extremely reserved, highly intelligent and very good at everything she did, but Vera would never do things she wasn't good at.” And she was the sort of person people wanted to “suck up to,” said Annie. “People would not want to be in her bad books.”

  Studying the photograph again, Annie described in remarkable detail the mountain gathering. It was a Whitsun celebration at the mountain home of one of Vera s uncles, somewhere in the Carpathians towards the border with Transylvania. She then told me exactly who was in the photo, identifying the figures one by one. What she remembered most about the weekend was a ceremonial sacrifice of newborn lambs. She had never been able to forget the screaming of the lambs.

  How could I find the place? She didn't know. That part of Romania had gone back to Hungary in the war, and the property would have been destroyed. Vera and her family all left Romania well before the war, but, Annie said, she had stayed on. In 1949, while working in the press office of the British legation, she was seized by the Communists, who had by then taken over in Romania. On trumped-up charges, laid against all Romanian nationals working for the British legation, Annie and her sister, Nora, were imprisoned for twelve years.

  “You might find Crasna, though,” said Annie suddenly, as if I would know the name. Crasna, she explained, was where Vera mostly lived. Her father had had a large estate there with thousands of acres of woods. Where was it? I asked, but Annie didn't know, except to say it was in the north, probably in the region of Bukovina.

  Annie had given me the vital clue. With a name of a place, I could at last travel to Romania and begin to search there. Yet there were at least five Crasnas in Romania, I subsequently found, three of them in the area Annie had directed me to. As I was about to leave for Bucharest to try my luck with the various Crasnas, Annie rang, saying she had found out more. Her friend Prince Mihai Sturdza, a descendant of one of the most illustrious families in Romania, said that the place I was looking for was no longer called Crasna at all; and it wasn't even in Romania. I had to find a place called Krasno'illshi, which was somewhere near the town of Czernovitz, across the border of northern Romania in Ukraine. There were bandits, and I would need a Ukrainian visa.

  “Visas take three days to process,” said the woman at the Ukrainian consulate in Notting Hill. “But I'm leaving in three days' time,” I told her.

  “So you will have to apply today,” she said. “We close in one hour.”

  10.

  The Danube Delta

  When I emerged from the Hotel Boulevard, on Bucharest's Calea Victoriei, Ion Rizescu, my driver, interpreter, and guide, was bent under the b
onnet of a battered yellow Mercedes. His torso eventually appeared and straightened. He was a tall, craggy man, dressed in a thick black anorak. It was likely to be icy up there on the border, he said in slow, gravelly French.

  We planned to leave by eight a.m. in order to reach Galatz, on the Danube delta, and find Vera's birthplace before nightfall. From Galatz we were to head north to Ukraine in search of Crasna—or, as I now knew it to be called, Krasno'illshi—which had been Vera's main childhood home. Then we would turn back towards the southwest, cutting deep into the Carpathians, where we would try to find the spot where Vera, family, and friends gathered for a Whitsun picnic in 1933.

  I had everything that might help me find the places I was looking for: compass references, photographs, and maps, and most important, I now also had Vera's uncle Siegfried's memoir. When the snow had finally melted in Quebec, Vera's relatives in Canada had dug out this ninety-nine-page family history and put it in the post.

  Steam spewing from the bonnet of the car, we left Bucharest and struck out across vast flats of tilled brown soil running into a February sky.

  With me I also had Vera's birth certificate. Nobody I had spoken to ever knew exactly where she had been born. Fortunately, before she died, a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London asked her to declare in an interview for the sound archives the actual city of her birth, to which she responded in her best drawl: “I was born at Galatz on the Danube delta.”

  The interviewer then dared to press her further: “Why were you born in Galatz?”

  Vera took a deep draw on her cigarette (on the tape I could hear the intake of breath) and after a long pause she quipped: “Because my mother was there, I suppose.”

  Once Galatz was pinpointed, it was not hard to get the facts of Vera s birth.

  Her original birth certificate, found in the archives in Galatz, read as follows: “Certificat de Nastere. Numele de familie: Rosenberg. Yrenumele: Vera-May. Sexul: Femeiesc. Data nasterji, Anul 1908; Luna Junie, Ziua 2. Locul, Galati, 135 Domneasca str.” In the Romanian calendar her time of birth was given as two-thirty a.m. on June 2, which, in the Western calendar, was June 15, and this was, of course, the date she always used.

  The more complicated question of how Vera had come to be born in Galatz had been answered for me by Uncle Siegfried's family history, with help from a South African rabbi.

  Vera's father, Maximilian Rosenberg, was born in Kassel, Germany, in 1874, the eldest of the five children of Simeon Rosenberg, a prosperous Jewish farmer and trader, and his wife Freda (née Hermann). The Rosenbergs had lived near Kassel for several generations.

  Max had a sister, Bertha, whom Siegfried described as “very intelligent and brave,” and three brothers: Siegfried himself, Arthur, and Paul. After an idyllic childhood—“We had a nice pond with lizards… On Sundays we got the geese out of their cages and held a goose race”—the three brothers started work in their father's timber import-export business in Kassel. Max, however, changed direction and went to Hamburg to train and work as an architect. In 1892, when Hamburg was devastated by a cholera epidemic, he looked for a new beginning, and like many Jews of his generation, he made for Cape Town, where he was taken under the wing of a powerful businessman named Henry Atkins.

  At this point Rabbi Hillel Avidan, one of Vera's South African cousins, took up the story for me, saying he was not surprised I had found Vera's history hard to fathom. The family liked to hide its Jewish roots.

  Vera's maternal great-grandfather was born in 1766, in Gomel, Be-lorussia, and his name was Jehudah Etkins (or perhaps Etkin or Etkind). Jehudah's children, including Vera's grandfather, Henry (formerly Hein-rich and before that Hirsch Zvi) Etkins, were also born in Gomel. This isolated town near Chernobyl, north of Kiev and southeast of Minsk, was, by the nineteenth century, in the heart of the Pale of Settlement, where the majority of Russia's Jews were forced to live by the tsars, trapped in towns and shtetls. As many as twenty thousand Jews lived in Gomel in the nineteenth century, which was half its total population, and when, in the late nineteenth century, pogroms became a common occurrence, the Etkins family began to flee. Henry left from Odessa in the late 1870s, just before a spate of anti-Jewish riots.

  Travelling via London, he moved on to Cape Town, then to Kimber-ley, where he supplied pit props for diamond mines. Henry Etkins and his wife Katherine (née Foyen) then returned to London, and in 1881 Zeffro Hilda was born in the subdistrict of St. Mary in the County of Middlesex, according to her birth certificate. The family's address was given on the certificate as 105 Christian Street, Brick Lane, London. Other Etkins brothers from Gomel were now settling in England, and Rabbi Hillel Avidan's grandfather had bought two tobacconist's shops in Streatham High Road, south London.

  Vera's grandfather, Henry, however, was soon back in Cape Town accumulating wealth. He became a friend of Cecil Rhodes and other pioneers of the diamond fields. By the turn of the century, as more and more eastern European Jews poured into South Africa, Henry Atkins had successfully erased his own Russian roots and was now passing himself off as a true Englishman, which enabled him to join Cape Town's prestigious Garden Synagogue. No eastern European Jew was allowed in this synagogue—only Jews of English or German origin.

  Henry then started new businesses, including the export of ostrich feathers. During the Boer War he sold large quantities of Australian frozen canned meat, flour, and oats to feed the British Army. He later purchased the Lace Diamond Mine and became one of the biggest property developers in Cape Town.

  By the time Vera's father, Max Rosenberg, arrived in South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Henry Atkins was an influential patron. “With the boom in building at that time my oldest brother became very rich,” wrote Siegfried Rosenberg. “He built houses and raised mortgages wherever he could.” He also became engaged to Henry Atkins's eldest daughter, Zeffro Hilda, known as Hilda, and the couple travelled to England for their marriage, which took place at the Central London Synagogue on November 12, 1902. Hilda, already born in England, no doubt hoped to entrench her English roots by making sure her marriage vows were exchanged there too. Afterwards the couple returned to live in South Africa, where their first child, Ralph, was born in 1905.

  By this time the Boer War had precipitated a reversal in Max's fortunes. As Siegfried recounted, prices fell, and Max, unable to recoup his debts, left South Africa. “When he wanted to sell the buildings he could hardly pay back the mortgages so he decided to sell all his houses and leave.”

  While Max had been in Cape Town, two of his three brothers, Arthur and Siegfried, had set out from Kassel to exploit the timber of Bukovina— the name means “beech forest”—which then lay on the eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They then ventured farther to exploit the forests of Romania. Exporting timber from the Danube ports through the Black Sea to Rotterdam, Arthur and Siegfried were, by 1908, making a name for themselves on the Danube delta, where they had founded a successful shipping agency.

  Paul, the youngest of the four brothers, stayed in Kassel and handled the German end of the business, now called Gebrüder Rosenberg Hand-lung.

  “We had a good business so we told our older brother who had lost everything in South Africa to come and join us,” wrote Siegfried. “He came and took over the shipping agency at Galatz and at Constanza.” When Max arrived in Galatz, he brought with him his new young wife, Hilda, and their son, Ralph. So this was how Vera's mother happened to be in Galatz in 1908 at the time when Vera was born.

  Vera always regretted her father's decision to move from South Africa to Romania. In a unique moment of self-revelation, she said so openly during an interview with a British Home Office official when she was seeking naturalisation.

  “Miss Atkins told me,” wrote the official, “that her father was unfortunately persuaded to enter the family timber business in Romania, and they all went there to live.” Had he stayed in Cape Town—even just for another three years—Vera would have been born in an Englis
h colony, with an automatic right to be English, which was what she wanted all her life. Instead, Vera was born in Romania. History would dictate that as a result she would have to fight to be recognised as English and would never really know—nor would anybody else—quite who she was or where she belonged.

  Our Mercedes approached the western side of Galatz, dominated by the towering graveyard of iron that was the Sidex steelworks, one of Ceausescu's most monstrous bequests to his nation. The Danube, a mile wide at this point, stretched out ahead of us in a vast brown expanse, across which chugged a single dredger, attempting to remove decades of deposited mud and silt. When Max Rosenberg arrived here in the early twentieth century, the delta was crammed with vessels lapping up every opportunity for profit offered by this huge transcontinental waterway.

  At that time Galatz itself had a thriving economy, owing in large part to the prosperous local Jewish community. The city's Jewish population was nearly twenty thousand strong—mostly small traders but also a substantial number of rich bourgeois Jews who, forbidden by law to own land, put assets into business or banking.

  The Jews of Galatz had come from all over Europe, but the majority had arrived in the nineteenth century after fleeing persecution in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland. They had been allowed to install themselves in certain parts of the city. One of these was the area around the central market. And here was 135 Domneasca Street, the house where Vera was born. An elegant single-storey villa, shaded by linden trees, Vera's birthplace lay in the heart of the wealthiest Jewish quarter, now the poorest part of the city, abandoned in many places to beggars and Gypsies.

  At the time of Vera's birth Max Rosenberg was fast rebuilding the fortune he had lost in South Africa, and soon he had started his own shipping agency, exporting the timber from his brothers' mills. He also began to borrow again, to build shipyards in Galatz and Constanza. By 1908, the year Vera was born, the family was able to adopt the luxurious colonial lifestyle which at that time prevailed among Romania's expatriate community. As nations vied for their slice of trade and political influence in the Balkans, diplomats and international businessmen poured into the ports of the Danube delta, and Max's position as a powerful businessman gave him an automatic entrée to this set. Soon the family had moved to a larger house in Braila, another flourishing Danube port.