‘I see,’ said Kit slowly. ‘Or rather, I don’t quite. Why should they need a special advisor? And Hilda wasn’t an Austrian citizen, ever.’
‘No. But there was some kind of slant on her job. It was mainly to do with finding and honouring Austrians who had opposed the takeover of the country by the Nazis in 1938, the Anschluss – opposed it by leaving, sometimes by working from within, or by simply being Jews and dying in the concentration camps in the years before 1945. The job was suddenly made for her at the time when Europe needed to feel better about their role in the Second World War.’
‘This sounds interesting. Especially as Hilda may have seen her father in Austria or he may have had some Austrian connection.’
‘Exactly,’ said Binkie cheerfully. ‘In any case the only point I’m making is that this friend may have been the one who brought the father and daughter together.’
‘Do you know her age? Is she likely to be still alive?’
‘My impression is that she was a year or two older than Hilda. No reason why she shouldn’t be alive.’
‘And no reason why she shouldn’t be dead,’ said Kit cheerfully. ‘But it’s worth a try. I’ll get on to the embassy.’
‘Good luck with that. And could you give me another look at the diaries?’
‘I’m itching to. I’m interested in anything that helps me to know Hilda better.’
Kit’s instinct, in matters that concerned his adoptive family, was to act at once. When he put down the phone he got on to Directory Enquiries and was told the number of the Austrian embassy. He introduced himself as the son of a man who had been on one of the Kindertransport trains. The voice at the other end was slightly bored, as if she had heard from all too many such.
‘I think the person you want to speak to is Mrs Madison.’
‘I was given the name of Leonore or Nora.’
‘That’s right. English people usually settle for Nora. She’s in today, and she has some spare time. Would you like me to fit you into the three o’clock slot? That would give you up to an hour of her time.’
‘Please do slot me in. My name is Christopher Philipson. I’ll be there at ten to three.’
He examined his mental list of things he might take in during his London visit, and decided to go to the exhibition of Flemish art at the Queen’s Gallery. He thought it might prove soothing but he was, in fact, intensely excited by so many rarely seen masterpieces, and his mind was all the time on his mother, Genevieve, and how she would have illuminated the pictures for him. It was with a sense of impending revelations that he walked from the Underground station to the embassy, and this stomach-churning excitement grew in his ten-minute wait outside the door of ‘Leonore Madison, Special Advisor on Citizenship’.
The office he was ushered into was like a well-used domestic sitting room, complete with TV, bookcases and easy chairs. There was a desk, but it was humanised by the substantial woman who sat behind it. She must, Kit felt, be at least seventy, but the eyes in her turtle-like face were alive with interest and enjoyment of life. The face was sallow, minimally but carefully made-up, and Kit was pretty sure she was wearing a wig.
‘Thank you for seeing me. My name is—’
‘Philipson. Yes, I have your name in front of me. It interests me because it is not common.’
‘No, it’s not. And I believe you have been a friend of my aunt.’
She smiled a smile of self-satisfaction.
‘Ah, so I am right. Dear Hilda. Yes, we were friends. Not close, intimate friends, you understand: people who shared every mood, every secret. No, we weren’t that, but we did enjoy each other’s company. She first came to me years ago with a problem, or let’s call it an enquiry, and we stayed friends for the rest of her life.’
‘Am I allowed to know what the enquiry was about?’
She raised her hand, palm outwards. She was no pushover.
‘Hold your horses, young man! Maybe, and maybe not. First I want to know who I’m talking to.’
Kit nodded.
‘I’m the son of Jürgen Philipson, Hilda’s brother, who was, like her, one of the Kindertransport children.’
‘And, of course, the adopted son of the Philipsons, having originally in Germany been called Greenspan. Jürgen no doubt found adoption of you easy to contemplate – which is not always the case among those from Central and Eastern Europe – because he had been successfully adopted himself. Because you were adopted by him and his wife, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, I was. I wasn’t trying to hide that. The fact is, it’s rather complicated, with lots of blank spaces.’
‘Finding one’s birth mother is very common these days, especially if the adoption went through the usual channels.’
Kit was disconcerted but heartened by her acumen.
‘I’ve already found my birth mother, even though the adoption didn’t go through the “usual channels”, as you call them. I’m perhaps misleading you when I call it an adoption at all.’
‘So what happened to put you into Jürgen Philipson’s care – excellent care, so Hilda always said?’
‘Yes, excellent care, from both him and his wife, my mother. The complicating factor is that I became “available” as a result of abduction.’
She looked at him as if the world had turned upside down, then she whistled.
‘You mean you were kidnapped? At Jürgen’s instigation?’
‘Kidnapped, yes. At his instigation? I would very much doubt that. Jürgen was the most upstanding, the most moral person I’ve ever known.’
A glint came into Nora Madison’s eye.
‘Have you thought of selling your story to the Walt Disney Corporation? He likes British pantomime plot lines.’
Kit, after a moment’s pause, laughed heartily.
‘Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington? I’ve seen those. And does Peter Pan count? Yes, there is a sort of make-believe aspect to my story, in its early stages. I remember little from the abduction.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I was only three, the same age my father was when he took the train to England with Hilda. I remember my nursery, the pictures on the walls, and the smell of my birth mother when she’d been cooking.’
‘Not bad for a start. So what about your birth mother? You say you’ve found her. Is she happy to have you back?’
‘Deliriously.’
‘And happy you are making enquiries into the abduction?’
Kit shrugged, hiding his unease. ‘I suspect she thinks it’s a waste of time. I’m back, she’s got me home, and I’ve got her. We have time to get to know each other. I imagine she thinks I ought to be satisfied with that.’
‘I’d have thought … well, never mind. I don’t know her, do I? What do you know about the abduction?’
‘That’s the point – almost nothing. The people who did it I never saw again. Correction: I never remember seeing them again. Almost all my early memories are of Genevieve and Jürgen and a succession of au pairs. But odd things seem to attach themselves to the abduction. There was a confrontation between Jürgen and my birth father at a conference in Glasgow a few years ago.’
‘Who and what is – or was – your birth father?’
‘Frank Novello, a solicitor in Leeds. He has got some sort of reputation through sorting out rivalries between the various gangs – mostly of Italian origin – in Glasgow. He, my birth father, is a sardonic, mischief-making kind of man – to me not the peacemaking sort at all. When I went to see him recently he seemed to deny that he is my father, and he’s said similar things to others. That is all rather odd, because he made no such assertions at the time of my birth parents’ separation or the divorce, which happened two or three years after the abduction.’
Nora looked intrigued, as if this were the sort of problem that she enjoyed.
‘Interesting. So how does Hilda come into this?’
‘She doesn’t. But that rather dramatic confrontation I mentioned, at the conferen
ce in Glasgow – from what I know about Jürgen there are two things that occur to me as possible grounds for the disagreement.’
‘And these are?’
‘First me. Jürgen, either knowingly or unknowingly, accepted a child who had been abducted and made that child his own. Perhaps Novello was threatening to take me away.’
‘Interesting still, though lots of unanswered questions occur to me. Go on.’
‘Here’s how you can perhaps help me. I have very little information about Jürgen and Hilda’s birth father. Hilda’s journal – we have just two years of it, while she was living with the Philipsons but before they legally adopted her – reveals that Hilda’s mother, before Hilda left on the train, had told her something upsetting about her father: the mother’s husband, or perhaps her lover, her seducer or whatever.’
‘Something to his discredit?’
‘That seems very likely. Hilda says she wishes she had not been told whatever it was.’
‘There is something rather ugly about one parent setting children against the other parent.’
‘Yes. And we do not learn from the diary or from anywhere else that Hilda’s mother was unpleasant by nature – quite the reverse. And when you think about it, and the circumstances in which the revelation to the daughter was made, it possibly was done only reluctantly, as a necessity.’
‘I see what you mean. That if the mother found herself trapped in Germany, with the concentration camps the only prospect—’
‘The camps which Jews were beginning to hear about, even though other Germans managed apparently to remain ignorant of them till 1945. The mother might have feared that the children would find themselves in England and being reclaimed by their father. If she had good reason to think that such a reunion would be a disaster, then she might have felt she had to issue a warning – impressing it on the child at a crucial moment in her life, when she was departing for a new country.’
‘And the child might understand her gesture in a quite different way.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She thinks she is being set against her father, at this crucial, highly emotional moment, and she feels this is wrong – mean.’
‘That sounds convincing. But she was only eight …’
‘Agreed, but she hadn’t had the experience of a normal eight-year-old. She must have been terribly lacking in things – people – to cling to.’
‘And she clung to her father, the idea of her father, because otherwise she had only her mother, whom she was losing that very day.’
Nora mulled over that for a while.
‘Yes. That seems to me a possibility,’ she said at last.
‘I take your point about people to cling to, because I think Jürgen tried to be completely self-reliant for the same reason. You, who knew Hilda quite well, must have sensed the same reaction in her.’
‘I knew Hilda superficially well.’
‘Did you talk often about her father?’
‘I wouldn’t say often, but we did talk.’
‘Did you get the impression of her resenting her mother’s trying to manipulate her attitude to her father?’
Nora Madison hesitated.
‘I suppose I must have. But the idea only came to me now, as a result of hearing about the diaries. I have no doubt that Hilda loved her mother very much, but I think she also wanted to think well of her father.’
‘Maybe that’s true of most children. Emotionally she was cut in half, as I see it.’
‘I wouldn’t want to exaggerate this feeling towards her father, whom she virtually never knew. If she had met him – which she may well have done – and if he had made an unpleasant or irresponsible impression on her – his behaviour generally does suggest a strain of irresponsibility – she would have discarded him without any hesitation as he in her babyhood had discarded her. But she would have gone to the meeting hoping not to have to do that.’
‘Yes, that does make sense. But did she tell you about a meeting?’
‘Oh no. And I never would have asked her. I helped her with family things but I didn’t participate.’
‘But did you find out anything about her father? That is how you came together, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Hilda remembered her mother saying her father was in Vienna, remembered her waiting for letters with Austrian stamps. That’s why Hilda first came to see me.’
‘So you took this … this case, this enquiry on board and tried to find out about her father and his fate.’
‘That roughly covers it – but don’t make it sound too much like a private detective’s brief: I went through notes on past enquiries, and when new ones came along that could possibly be related to him I brought his name into the conversations. That was almost the sum total of what I could do. What I have is a desk job, not an expanding brief.’
‘I see that. But you did have some results?’
‘That’s putting it too definitely. I got some ideas.’
‘Can you share them with me?’
‘I don’t see why not. There was a character, quite prominent in Jewish circles in Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck and so on. His name was Walter Greenspan. Round about early 1938 he faded out, but there was another man called Ludwig Weisskopf who was doing the same sort of thing.’
‘And that was?’
‘Getting money out of Austria and Germany so that the people he did it for had some remains of their capital when, or if, they escaped – to Britain, France (God help them!), Canada, USA and so on.’
‘You got the idea that Greenspan and Weisskopf were the same person, did you?’
‘Yes. I think he adopted a new identity and maybe a new appearance when things got hot for him.’
‘And what did you find out, or conjecture, about him?’
‘I conjectured that he worked with the Germans, which is to say the Nazis. Or, perhaps more likely, he worked with a German in an influential position.’
‘That is a pretty staggering accusation.’
‘Yes,’ said Nora, nodding. ‘Particularly on the basis of guesswork. There is more to find out – much more – than I ever proved. But what struck me was the result of all his undercover work. First of all, plenty of the people he helped – there should be inverted commas around that word if I am right – got out of Austria and made good use of the money waiting for them. The success rate – let’s call it that – was rather higher than that for people who got out by their own endeavours. It needed to be, to make the business viable.’
‘There’s a “but” coming.’
‘Yes there is. When those who got out were ready to resume control of the part of their wealth left in Austria at the end of the war they found much of it was gone – dissipated, taken over. An even bigger “but” exists over those clients who weren’t successful in getting away.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you go through the long list of people who got themselves involved with Mr Greenspan aka Weisskopf, there is a group who were very much richer than was generally known.’
‘How did you get to know about them?’
‘Because it was whispered in the Jewish community of their respective hometowns, but not known to the Aryan majority. A large number of Weisskopf’s clients – let’s call them that – were taken by the SS and were sent to concentration camps, where invariably they died. And here I’m talking about the late Thirties and early Forties, before the camps became mere staging posts on the road to a mass gassing.’
‘In other words they were betrayed by Greenspan aka Weisskopf, who would then get a share of the proceeds?’
‘Yes. That’s what I think. In fairness I should say, though, that there could be other explanations: if the wealth of these people was known in the Jewish community, anyone in that community could have acted as a traitor to the individual or the community.’
‘True … Two things occur to me: it seems likely this enterprise would have to be more than a one-man operation.’
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sp; ‘I thought of that. You’re right. He would need people he could rely on to follow up rumours, if possible firm them up, check, arrange false papers and so on.’
‘The other thing is, he must have been in a position of great danger himself. His German contact, the moment he felt the net closing around him, would have thrown Greenspan to the wolves. Inevitably, Greenspan would have been advertising his own position as a Jew every day of his life, unless he could use non-Jewish underlings to do the work for him. If he tried to operate mainly by telephone he was risking the distinct possibility that the line would be tapped. Most lines were.’
‘You’re not asking me to admire him?’
‘Certainly not. But it seems a remarkable achievement if he could be proved to have survived the war.’ He thought hard for a moment. ‘I shall need to go to Vienna,’ he said. ‘There must be survivors, people who remember what was going on at the time.’
‘I think you may do better by going to the States,’ said Nora. ‘More of them are there, if you can only get some sort of entre.’
‘But everyone there will be so far from those events. There must be some survivors in Austria, and their memories must be vivid, and revived every day as they see the place and the people.’
‘There will, I suppose, be some. Indeed, I know there are. But most of the people who said Vienna was their home and they would go back to it because they had no other – most of those are dead or, quite often, have gone to Israel in an equally vain attempt to find a home. Homes are not so easily found or refound, particularly when it was that home that first cast you out and killed the remnants of your family.’
‘I know it’s not so easy to find a home,’ said Kit.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One Family or the Other
Kit settled himself into the train that left King’s Cross a little after twelve. He folded his Times so as to have the crossword grid and its clues in the same segment, and then glanced at promising-looking clues. No revelation occurred. He remembered with a grin his father’s tetchy complaint a few weeks before he died: ‘There’s new people setting the crossword and they have no idea of the ethics of clueing.’ Kit wondered whether people had been saying that almost from the day, eighty-odd years before, when the stately matron among newspapers lowered her sights so as to take in word games. He had no doubt that his father’s death from heart failure had not been caused by his irritation, but perhaps it had contributed an iota to it.
A Stranger in the Family Page 14