“Was she a lesbian?” he asked. “She didn't marry, did she?”
I told him I wanted to ask his wife about the story she had told to Judith Hiller: about helping Vera escape from Holland during the war. He said he himself had been a naval officer and had never been involved in anything clandestine. But his wife had certainly been in Holland during the war.
“So might it be true?” I said.
“Well, this is my dilemma,” he sighed. “Some of the things she says turn out to be true. I could give you lots of examples of where she has been right. There are lots of grey areas. You will have to judge for yourself. At least she keeps a good house, so I can't complain.”
A few days later I returned to Kensington for my meeting with the second mystery “Belgian lady” who had been at Vera's funeral, and whom I now knew to be Dutch. An elderly woman came to the door with very light-grey hair folded in a turnip-shaped bun on top of her head. She was called Beatrice, and she was carefully dressed in a tweed pleated skirt, brown suede pumps, and a maroon cardigan. She offered coffee. She appeared very alert, and the room was immaculate, though rather dark. I explained why I had come. She seemed willing to help and began talking.
She told me she was born in The Hague and grew up in Holland. She met Vera Atkins in Amsterdam early in the war, when she was working in Amsterdam as a social worker, looking after the children of prostitutes. The story so far was clear. How did she come into contact with Vera?
Beatrice said she had had contacts with a man in the Amsterdam National Bank. The man was Vera's brother, and he said his sister was about to be deported and needed help. Beatrice now became hard to follow. Neither of Vera's brothers ever worked at the Amsterdam National Bank. Yet Beatrice talked a lot about “the man at the bank” in sentences that did not seem to join up in sequence. There was a lot of garbled matter. She seemed to be saying that she had been told to go and find Vera Atkins. It would be hard to identify her. So she was told to go to the red-light district, where she would have to recognise her. She would be undercover and posing as a prostitute.
What exactly did Beatrice mean? Her answer was hard to follow, but I think she was telling me that she had been told Vera Atkins would be sitting in the window, posing as a prostitute, in one of the brothels in the red-light district. That was where Beatrice had been told to go and find her. There would be a sign, she said.
I tried not to give up. Beatrice had moved on now and was talking about being on a train. All the time I tried to pick out names, places, facts that might be relevant and discard the jumble around them. It was as if Beatrice's thoughts had been through a tumble dryer and everything had got tangled up.
Among the web of sentences was talk of Princess Alexandra and President Trudeau; Maurice Buckmaster seemed to be tangled in there too. Then suddenly I caught a flash of Judith Hiller's account and tried to hold on to it. There was a crowd of people who were being deported to some sort of camp for Jews at a village near Apeldoorn. Beatrice went to the station in Amsterdam and got on a train with these people and managed to persuade the Germans on the train that she lived near the village and that Vera lived there too, so they both managed to get away from the others, and Beatrice took Vera to a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who also lived in the village near Apeldoorn. The family sheltered Jews. She said Vera then hid in a barn, and later Vera showed her a photograph of herself working in the hay barn at the farm in the village.
“Trudeau would know everything,” she said, and then the thoughts got tangled again. Audrey Hepburn was in the barn too.
“Whose barn was it?” I asked.
It was a barn owned by Beatrice's family. Her family lived in the village, she said, and showed me a photograph of the barn with its name on it. “It was a place where a lot people hid,” she said. Vera had never talked about this, I told her.
Beatrice then said: “Ah, but there were two Veras. I know now that there were two Veras. The other one was a proper English lady.” And now she was wondering if “our Vera” was perhaps really “a tart.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because of the way she used to walk up and down Knightsbridge.”
“How do you know she did that?”
“I used to see her.” Then Beatrice said that Vera was a “very shrewd woman.”
I asked if she saw Vera again after the war, and she said she did. She first bumped into her at the Sloane Square tube station and then saw her a lot in the 1950s but less in recent years.
“You must have felt close to her to go to the funeral,” I said.
“We had shared experiences. But there were two Veras. I know that now. I realised that ten minutes ago. Sometimes there were three.” Then she said: “It's a bit jumpy for you, isn't it? It's hard for you to follow,” as if she were reading my mind.
Beatrice got a map out and started finding places on it, as if to provide reassurance that she was not mad. She pointed out the village near Apeldoorn. Then she looked in the Dutch telephone directory and found the name of the family of Jehovah's Witnesses and gave me the telephone number, suggesting I call them. I said I would.
Now, as I got up to leave, Beatrice was talking about how people get too concerned with the marmalade and the details of life. Her husband talked so much about the marmalade.
However confused Beatrice's story had been, it was not inconsistent with Gilberte's story. Gilberte had told me that when she met Vera in Antwerp, she had “come down from Holland”—from Amsterdam or Rotterdam, she thought. Both women talked of Vera being with a man, perhaps a brother. The man was older than Vera.
It was frustrating that neither story had given any answer to the most important question: why was Vera in Holland or Belgium at that time? But in this Gilberte and Beatrice were also quite consistent: neither had asked, and neither had ever been told.
The fact that Vera approached Gilberte through the diamond industry suggested that diamonds might have been a possibility. Annie Samuelli, Vera's friend from Romania, considered it quite likely that the Rosenbergs would have put their money into diamonds before the war. Many Jewish families chose to do this, and Vera's South African family had once owned a diamond mine. Perhaps Vera suddenly needed a lot of cash, but for what reason, I did not yet know.
26.
Heroine
Although hard information about Vera was difficult to come by, anecdotes about her were plentiful, and many were about money. Generous bequests from her South African grandfather, Henry Atkins, who died in 1937, had ensured she always had private means, but she watched her money grow in the bank or invested it on the Stock Exchange rather than spent it. “She would take yesterday's cold dinner with her on the train up to London rather than pay for a sandwich,” said Christine, her cleaner.
In the 1960s, with her elder brother, Ralph, Vera went into business, importing Tuppit teapots. The Tuppit had an inbuilt strainer to stop tea leaves floating around, but the idea did not take off.
Vera also enjoyed a flutter—on the National Lottery, for example. A neighbour related how she had once been woken at midnight by an anxious-sounding Vera demanding a lift. Expecting an emergency, she found instead that Vera wanted a ride to a late-night store. She had forgotten to buy a lottery ticket.
Because Vera didn't like to spend her money, it was sometimes said that she was mean. “But I never had to ask for a rise,” Christine told me. And I heard many stories of her generosity. Her niece, Zenna, remembered the most interesting anecdote about Vera and money. Vera had once had to take a large sum of money on a long and dangerous journey, Zenna told me.
When was that? I asked.
She wasn't sure at first. It was a story she had heard her father, Guy, and Vera tell many times when she was a child. It came up when the two grown-ups were discussing the meanness of their mother, Hilda. They would reminisce a while, and then Vera would always say: “Well, Mother wasn't mean on that occasion. Oh, no!” A story was then told about how early in the war a relative was in danger of being
deported to a concentration camp. So with Vera's help, Hilda got together money to help the relative. Vera then had to travel somewhere, either to collect or deliver the money. Zenna could recall no more. But she said it must have happened just after her father was posted to Africa.
“Why then?” I asked, and she recalled another anecdote.
There was a lot of one-upmanship between Guy and Vera, said Zenna, and in this same conversation the siblings would talk about how Vera had undertaken the dangerous journey and not Guy. (Ralph was en poste in Istanbul at the time.) Then Guy would defend himself by saying how he couldn't have helped because by then he was serving with the East Africa Rifles. When did he go out to Africa? Zenna could not be precise, but her father's papers suggested it was sometime in 1940. I wondered if this mystery journey was linked to Vera's appearance in the Low Countries. But who was the relative who needed help?
While most of Vera's German relatives had fled to Chile, Palestine, or the United States, several Rosenberg cousins, sons and daughters of Max's siblings, were still on the Continent at the outbreak of war. The Cologne cousins, Klaus and Gert, had stayed in Germany but little was known of them. The rumour in the family was that Gert joined the Luftwaffe and became one of Goering's pet pilots. He was killed in an air raid in 1943. His brother, Klaus, somehow survived the war in Germany, but was impossible to trace.
Vera's cousin Aenne, daughter of her aunt Bertha, had stayed on in Berlin. She was an artist and married another, Manfred Pahl, and they had a daughter named Beate, who was already eighteen when war broke out. At first Aenne believed she would not be persecuted by the Nazis, because her husband was not a Jew. But by 1940 the family were in great peril and were forced into hiding in Berlin. Beate was safely hidden. Aenne, however, was eventually arrested, although, astonishingly, she was not sent to a concentration camp. Instead she was imprisoned in the Jewish Hospital, in the Wedding district of Berlin, part of which the Nazis had converted into a jail for favoured Jews. She was released after the war, traumatised but, miraculously, alive. Beate (now Beate Orasche) never learned how it was that her mother had been spared, although there was talk that a friend with influence may have intervened to save her life. This talk did not involve Vera, as far as Beate knew.
Vera's strongest family ties had always been with the Romanian branch of the Rosenbergs. At the outbreak of war her uncles Arthur and Siegfried, and Arthur's sons Fritz, George, and Hans, were still living in Vallea Uzului. Even though the family company in Germany had by now been Aryanised—in other words, forcibly taken over by non-Jews—life in Vallea Uzului was still largely insulated from the threat of fascism. As Uncle Siegfried wrote in his memoir: “Until 1940 all went quite well.” During that year, however, the Rosenbergs' confidence began to shatter.
By mid-1940 Romania was being dismembered, and the Rosenbergs of Vallea Uzului faced the prospect of losing their homes and, later, of deportation to Auschwitz, along with hundreds of thousands of other Romanian and Hungarian Jews. The full extent of the threat was brought home when Fritz Rosenberg, Vera's cousin, who had by then taken over the family business in Vallea Uzului, was imprisoned in Hungary.
Fritz Rosenberg, I knew, had emigrated after the war to Canada and died there in 1998, and I had been told that he left many papers. The papers were in the shed, in Rawdon, Quebec, where Uncle Siegfried's memoir had come from. By the time I was able to travel to Canada to find out more, it was nearly winter again.
Karina Rosenberg, an engaging fair-haired woman in her mid-fifties, picked me up from Montreal, and as we drove to Rawdon, about one hundred kilometres to the north, she talked eagerly about her Rosenberg roots. Karina was the daughter of Fritz and Karen Rosenberg. Fritz had married Karen when she worked as the housekeeper at Vallea Uzului. Born Gehlsen, Karen was an educated German girl from a Lutheran family and much more down-to-earth than any Rosenberg, said Karina.
Unlike a Rosenberg, Karen liked to talk, so everything Karina learned about the family came from her mother. “My mother thought the Rosenbergs were very snooty,” she said. “She thought they had all been raised in a very rarefied atmosphere.”
Karina said that Fritz's father, Arthur—one of Vera's three uncles— had not approved of Fritz marrying her mother. “The maids were good enough for the Rosenberg men whenever they wanted, but it was not good enough to marry the housekeeper,” she told me. “And they were always conflicted about who they really were.” They were always changing their name, their religion, or their nationality. But the one Rosenberg whom Karina's parents, Karen and Fritz, had always admired was Vera. Nothing was ever said against Vera. She was somehow different. “In the family, she was the one we always looked up to. She had an almost mythical status for my parents.” I asked Karina why, but she didn't know.
We arrived at Rawdon, a small, white-boarded town, and headed on through forests towards a great white lake, and there, right on the water's edge, was Karina's house. A quiet and wooded place, it could almost have been in the Carpathian foothills. We pulled up at the house, and I was shown to a room that overlooked the lake and was piled high with boxes. Fritz's papers had by now been rescued from the shed.
Unlike his cousin Vera, Fritz had tried to open up his past in later life and reexamine it. Most of the papers in the boxes were used in Fritz's fruitless lawsuits seeking compensation from the German, Hungarian, Romanian, and Swiss governments. To support his cases, he had gathered everything he could find: photographs, certificates, letters in German, Hungarian, Romanian, and English. In a long statement to the embassy of the Republic of Hungary “regarding Hungarian Restitution Laws for Losses 1939–1949,” Fritz set out the family story, as Siegfried had, but in more detail, asserting again and again the family's birthright as Germans. He described how he and his twin brothers had been brought up in Germany and educated in Munich but had been forced to abandon their studies in 1933 “for obvious reasons.” There were numerous photographs of the three boys—Fritz small and dark, and the twins tall and much fairer, good-looking, in lederhosen, in bathing suits, in suits and ties. It was hard to tell them apart.
From Fritz's papers it seemed that until 1938 all was still going well in Vallea Uzului, but early that year there were signs that he was concerned about the future. Karen had become pregnant. A civil marriage certificate dated April 27, 1938, and a birth certificate for Peter Rosenberg dated two days later were both issued in Eastbourne, suggesting that Fritz wished to cement ties with England by marrying there and ensuring his son was British-born. Had he thought to stay in England as a refugee, this would have been the time to do so. “Fritz arrived in London,” wrote Hilda in her diary. But Fritz had soon taken his new family back to Romania, hoping no doubt that war could still be avoided.
From now on the files showed that Fritz was busy obtaining numerous statements testifying to his length of residence in Vallea Uzului, his good character, and his Catholic credentials. But a year later, on May 23, 1939, Fritz's German passport was stamped with a large redj. On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded the Low Countries and then surged into France. From now on, even if Fritz had wanted to reach England, he was well and truly cut off.
Closer to home, the carve-up of Romania was beginning: Germany and Italy were about to force it to hand over north Transylvania to Hungary. The deal that cemented the transfer, known as the Ribbentrop-Ciano agreement or the Vienna Diktat, was signed on August 30, 1940. From that date the province of Cuic, in which Vallea Uzului was situated, would be under Hungarian—and therefore German—control. For Jews living in these territories, the future could only bring terror. Fritz put it simply: “The situation changed with the signing of the Ribbentrop-Ciano agreement.”
Immediately the pact was signed, Hungarian police were sent to Vallea Uzului to requisition the company. The Rosenbergs tried to convince themselves that the Hungarian takeover was only a temporary setback. But soon the Hungarian police were telling them they could not tolerate foreigners, let alone Jews. The Rosenbergs protested that
they were German nationals, but the Hungarians said that made it worse. Fritz's father and uncle said they had won the Iron Cross in the First World War. “For a while they listened, but not for long,” wrote Fritz.
Siegfried and Arthur went to Budapest to seek some sort of protection for the family and the company, while Fritz stayed in Vallea Uzului with Karen and the new baby, Peter. Fritz still had faith that the German embassy in Budapest would set things right for them. “Our family was of German nationality and enjoyed the best reputation in European forestry and lumber circles.” And he added that “friends in Berlin” now tried to intervene to “sort things out.”
But just as the Rosenbergs' company in Cologne had been Aryanised, so the company in Romania was now “Hungarianised.” The Compania de Lemne became Uzvoglye Faipar RT. As a “foreigner” Fritz was now refused permission to work in his own timber business and was told to pack up and leave. Fritz and Karen prepared inventories so that there could be no mistakes when the family returned to reclaim their possessions. Fritz must have believed that he might one day return to the Valley of the Uz because he had even gone to the trouble of getting receipts for his hunting rifles. “Confiscated, in other words stolen,” he had written on the receipt.
The inventories from Vallea Uzului were here in these boxes. Every piece of machinery from the timber plant had been described and counted. Every book in the house had been named and entered. And every piece of linen had been folded, packed, and carefully checked and double-checked. Carrying little more than a few clothes and their precious inventories, Fritz, Karen, and baby Peter left for Hungary on September 23, 1941. When the train they were travelling in stopped at the Transylvan-ian town of Marosvasarhely, Fritz was immediately arrested and locked up in prison.
In Budapest, meanwhile, Fritz's father, Arthur Rosenberg, and his uncle Siegfried were still frantically seeing German and Hungarian “contacts” to find somebody reliable to “take charge of the business for a few years.” More urgently now, they were pleading with anyone they could for Fritz to be freed from jail.
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