A Stranger in the Family

by Robert Barnard

  Herr Erheim nodded.

  ‘Things began to change when my father fell ill. The main thing I knew about his early life was that he was one of the Kindertransport – the children who got out of Germany just before the war started.’

  ‘You don’t need to fill in the background for me. I lived through it.’

  ‘Of course. Well, he was one of the last out, and was always grateful for that – and perhaps a bit guilty-feeling towards all those who didn’t get out.’

  ‘The dead children. Yes, I can understand that. And the name he went under – was it Jürgen Greenspan?’

  ‘“Went under”? I don’t understand … You know, I never asked about his and Hilda’s surname before they were adopted by the Philipsons.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Erheim, with a wave of the hand putting the matter aside. ‘I think I once met your father, though of course, that was when he was so young there is little to be said about him. Quiet and serious, I’d guess.’

  ‘Yes. He remained that. I think that while he was ill he must have persuaded Genevieve to come clean with me over the “adoption” – give me all the facts. He must have thought it was well time. But my mother was diagnosed as having late-stage breast cancer not very long after his death, and so we never had the in-depth session. We talked about it but she was too weak for scenes. She only directed me towards her address book, and told me my birth mother was named Novello. I had vague memories of an earlier family and a strange plane trip, so I checked the old newspaper files and discovered I’d been abducted.’

  ‘And that is what you’ve been investigating since, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Unsure of what should be the correct reaction to an announcement of a childhood abduction, Herr Erheim waved his eloquent hand in the direction of the bottle.

  ‘Have another glass of this not entirely despicable wine …’

  ‘It’s very good. But I’m no expert …’

  Herr Erheim bowed his thanks.

  ‘Now let me tell you how I came to meet the man who interests you, and what I came to know.’ He settled back comfortably against his pillows. ‘The first meeting came in 1932.’

  ‘So early? Before Jürgen’s birth.’

  ‘Exactly. And before the Nazi takeover of this once-great country of Austria. I was only half Austrian – my mother’s side – and I grew up mainly in Germany, but I have a peculiar tenderness for this country and its capital. In that year, 1932, I was twelve, and I was in Berlin rather loosely boarding with an uncle of mine. The economic situation was appalling, and I organised a little band of child musicians who went around the bars and the clubs of the capital in the early evening – before their own entertainment started, and early enough for us not to be told we ought to be in bed. We had boys and girls in this band, and we played New Orleans stuff, stuff from the latest musicals – Showboat, No, No Nanette and so on – and though I say it myself we were quite good. I was the organiser, the clarinet player and the master of ceremonies. It must have been in that last role that I caught Greenspan’s eye. It was in the Hofmeister Bar, and when we were leaving after the collection had been taken he beckoned me over. “Very good,” he said. “You’re a promising lad. Here’s my card. If you’re ever in Vienna or Frankfurt the card has my contact numbers there. I’ll find something for you to do. A lad like you deserves a better life than glorified begging. Now remember, and keep this card. There’s bad times coming for us Jews.”’

  Kit seemed to see in the man’s face a shadow of the surprise the young Erheim must have felt.

  ‘Was this news to you?’

  ‘Completely. Both that the Jews had a bad time coming, and that I could be identified with “the Jews”. Of course, I knew I was Jewish, but thought that that was no more important than that some Germans were Prussians, some were Bavarians. So what, I’d always felt? Well, in the years that followed I learnt what it meant to be a Jew, and it was nothing like being a Prussian.’

  ‘Hadn’t you read newspapers?’

  ‘What boy of twelve reads newspapers? Then, in the summer of 1936, I went with a young English writer to Vienna. It was wonderful – a dream city – the buildings, the landscape, the mountains. I won’t tell you what the English boy and I got up to. We played, we quarrelled, we made up. I quite enjoyed the quarrels but I didn’t really enjoy the makings up. I’d taken that card with me. One day when we’d had an almighty row I rang the number, spoke to Greenspan, then went to see him. The English boy went back to Berlin. I stayed on working for my new benefactor.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  Erheim looked at Kit, but blinked. He seemed uncertain whether to boast or apologise about his activities.

  ‘Getting people and their money out of the country.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard hints of that. By “people” you mean Jews, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, almost entirely – just one or two Gentiles who’d fallen foul of the German or Austrian governments. We got rich Jews out, also their children, their mistresses. We ran a superb business – he ran, I should say. I was just the messenger boy.’

  ‘What did the “messenger boy” do?’

  ‘Delivered tickets, collected inordinate fees for services rendered … and quite a lot of stuff for Mr Greenspan himself.’ He winked. He’d decided to be brazen. ‘Personal stuff?’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Yes, oh yes, women. It was when I was doing personal stuff that I saw the boy who I think became your father.’

  ‘You visited the family?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve heard of the mother?’

  ‘I read a bit of a diary written by Jürgen’s sister, Hilde. There were mentions of the mother. Hilde’s view of her was in a way contradictory, but she obviously thought her mother was being unfair to her husband in many of the things she said about him to the children.’

  Erheim, after trying to suppress his reaction, burst out into a howl of laughter.

  ‘Unfair? Oh dear me, what a sad joke! The woman was obsessed with him. He could do anything and be forgiven. How do you think Jürgen came into the world, years after his sister, except as a result of a session of “forgiveness”? Oh dear – women don’t come more wrong-headed than Elisabeth Greenspan, as she called herself. When he was away from her, which was almost all the time, she could judge him justly. As soon as he reappeared, she went weak at the knees. I thought it was strange that Walter Greenspan told me all this, but I think it was a kind of boasting.’

  ‘You say “as she called herself”. Was Elisabeth not married to him?’

  Erheim’s face twisted in ridicule.

  ‘She had gone through a ceremony which had no legal validity at all. I think Walter Greenspan had got some of his actor friends to put something together that might fox her. He rejoiced in her naivety. The only thing he ever did to oblige her, getting the children on board that train, was, I thought, a little word of thanks for the joy that her artlessness had given him over the years.’

  ‘Sad, sad,’ said Kit. ‘What happened to her?’

  Erheim shrugged.

  ‘What happened to Jews in Central Europe? She was no different from the rest. Enough of her, young man. She was not important.’

  Kit was for a moment speechless. It was the man’s first big mistake, the moment when the curtains briefly collapsed, showing the cynical hardness Erheim would surely conceal from most of his visitors.

  ‘I would guess that that fate didn’t overtake Walter Greenspan,’ Kit said. His voice held no note of condemnation, and Erheim’s reply showed no sign of his having registered any disapproval.

  ‘Not on your life! Too sharp, too intelligent, and blessed with contacts everywhere, including the Gestapo and the SS. Not that things weren’t – what’s that funny word you have? – hairy now and then. I was still employed by him and running his errands in 1941. I was in greater danger than him of getting caught, but I would only be a small cog in the wheel, so where he, if he’d been caught, would have been shot or so
mething worse and slower, I would have been sent to one of the camps, which were then not quite the murder factories they later became.’

  ‘I suppose you decided to get out. You knew all the best ways.’

  ‘Of course I did. Turkey was one of the best routes out. I was having papers forged for a rich Viennese Jew’s son. I pocketed the papers, put my photograph on, and took the route through Romania. The government there was Fascist, anti-Semitic, but the king was biding his time and the country was yearning to change sides. I had a lot of help and I got through to Turkey, and stayed there till Greece was liberated.’

  ‘And the rich Jew’s son?’

  Erheim’s shrivelled shoulders were shrugged again.

  ‘How would I know? The fate of Central Europe’s Jews. Don’t ask me such questions. If you were a Jew at that time you could not afford a delicate conscience.’

  And Kit had to agree that that was probably true. He had not experienced the horror. Perhaps he should not judge. As Erheim said nothing, seemingly lost in reminiscence, he asked: ‘Do you remember the Greenspan children on the day of the Kindertransport?’

  ‘Do I remember? Of course. I was there. My benefactor sent me to Frankfurt to meet them.’ He frowned trying to recall details. ‘I managed to get them moved from a train on September 5th to one on the 29th of August. I sensed that war would come quickly and I wanted to get back as soon as possible to Vienna. Hitler was desperate for war. The children got out just in time. I saw them kissing their mother goodbye on a miserable field near the station, where no one would see them except other children, other parents. They hated sympathy, the Nazis, and they feared that family scenes like that would arouse it.’

  ‘And the later train never went, I suppose?’

  ‘No. The outbreak of war put a stop to it. All the children booked on it died. Hilde and Jürgen got through. They had a little pile of money which I brought them from their father. He was always generous.’

  ‘To himself as well, I’ve heard. It’s said he sometimes took clients’ money and sent them to their deaths.’

  ‘I never knew of anything of that sort,’ said Erheim, firing up. ‘I was a very straight boy, and he only involved me in above-board transactions – in so far as anything could be “above board” in Nazi Germany and Austria. That was the reason I split up from him and decamped to Turkey. It was a feeling that the Gestapo was getting close and they would take me just for being Jewish.’

  ‘How did you know they were getting close?’

  ‘Greenspan talked about it the last time we met. He was preparing to get out of Austria too. His main contact in the SS was going to help him. The SS man felt safer with Greenspan out of the country.’

  ‘He didn’t go to Turkey, I suppose – or you would know more about what happened to him.’

  ‘I know enough, boy,’ said Erheim wryly. ‘But no, he didn’t. It was one of his few miscalculations. He had got people out through Italy before. It was the least policed of the borders because the new Nazi rulers of Austria calculated that escapees wouldn’t want to go from one Fascist country to another.’

  ‘Why would they?’

  ‘Because Greenspan – and he was not alone – took the view that Mussolini didn’t care a fig if a man was a Jew or a Pole or a Czech. He only persecuted a few Italian Jewish families to convince Hitler that he was with him on the racial question. In fact, his only interest in Jews was to squeeze money out of them. If they had money they could buy immunity in Italy. It was Greenspan’s view that he would be safe as long as he could stump up, and this, I heard later, he did for his first few months there.’

  ‘Where was he living?’

  ‘Venice, after he’d taken the train there with forged papers all in order. By then the fortunes of war, as they called them, were changing. The Allies were invading Sicily. By the time they got to the mainland Greenspan had moved south hoping to change sides, and was almost in the firing line. He was arrested and imprisoned in the nearest Italy had at that date to a concentration camp.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Ferramonti, on the mainland, in Calabria, not far from Naples. He’d gone south hoping to get to the Allied part of southern Italy because he saw them as the inevitable victors. By then camps for Jews had been set up all over Italy. Eventually most of the inmates were transported to Auschwitz and other camps.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if Mussolini was an unenthusiastic anti-Semite.’

  ‘At that point his whole hold on power – what little he had – depended on the German troops. He would have liked to go on squeezing the Jews rather than imprisoning them, but he had no choice. Soon he was retreating northwards with the German army.’

  ‘How did you find out all this?’

  ‘When Greenspan vanished from Vienna I was still working for him, and I had, as my final task, to get a young Jewish man out of Austria and into Italy. When we met last I told him to write to me in coded terms if he had any news of Greenspan. In Istanbul I went to the British embassy every day to read reliable newspapers in their reading room. It was then that I perfected my English. They kept mail for people they knew, whether English or not. The young man sent me a letter with hints about Greenspan, whom he called Durataverdi – the nearest he could get to Greenspan in Italian. He’d been in Venice, had come south, and was by then in Ferramonti, the Calabrian camp, with Gypsies, Mafiosi and homosexuals, showing that Mussolini was definitely dancing to Hitler’s tunes. As the war was drawing to a close I wrote a letter to Signor Durataverdi in Ferramonti and sent another version to the Eighth Army. I never had any reply.’

  Kit tried to digest the sad little story.

  ‘And that was the end of your relationship with Greenspan?’

  ‘It was, strictly speaking. But something happened later, much later, that made me think. I can’t put an exact date to it. Let’s say 1995 for an approximation. By then Greenspan would have been in his eighties. It was a time when the Italian government was engaged in a big close-down of the Mafia and related societies. This happens periodically in Italy, or rather does not happen because it’s mostly talk and nothing gets done. This time more was done, many were arrested, one of the judges who was drafted in to ensure that something was done was killed and another lost his bottle – lovely phrase – and fled from south Italy, or the Mezzogiorno as the Italians call it. The difficulty was in getting convictions, as with all gangland crimes. One after another of the accused men were acquitted. One of the men mentioned in the news accounts – I expect you could guess – had the name—’

  ‘Durataverdi. A distinctive name. Then you must have learnt a lot about him from the newspapers, and I could do the same.’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll learn as much as you think. I certainly did what you say, read all the papers I could get hold of, but the fact that he was acquitted did not help. It made editors scared of libel actions. Then there was the fact that he was apparently a bit of a man of mystery, even with his fellow crooks. References to his origins often used vague forms like “Eastern European” or “shrouded in mystery”. Only one account of him mentioned Austria or Vienna as his place of origin, and I’m not sure that was correct: his accent when I knew him was Central German. Later it was varied, depending where he was. The only fact that one of the journalists had, which then spread to all the other newspapers, was that Durataverdi had been imprisoned in the notorious Ferramonti concentration camp during the war. That fact enabled other ex-inmates to earn a few thousand lire by peddling to the papers their memories of the place. There were few memories of Greenspan, probably due to the usual fear of reprisals. There’s no doubt in my mind that he was pretty high up in the Mafia hierarchy. And that he was the man I knew here in Vienna so long ago. No doubt either that he squirmed his way into the organisation while he was in Ferramonti … and that, my dear young fellow, is all I know about the man who may or may not be your adoptive grandfather, if such a relationship exists. Let us share the rest of the wine.’

 
; Kit shook his head.

  ‘Not for me, thank you. I want to keep my head clear.’

  ‘There are some subjects for which it is better not to have a clear head. I will therefore take on the task of drinking to the bottom of the bottle. Death to doctors!’

  He was clearly in a high-spirited mood, perhaps with having told all he knew about Greenspan. He drank with relish. Though he must have hidden many aspects of himself from his admiring visitors over the years, he didn’t bother to hide his relish for food and drink. Very Austrian!

  ‘So Greenspan was never legally married to Elisabeth Greenspan?’

  Erheim indulged in one of his raucous laughs.

  ‘Of course not! Never! And never to anyone else, in the time I knew him, though with some others he may also have had some theatrical version of the ceremony. Why do you ask? Is it important to you to find out there was a marriage? Would the lack of it have worried Jürgen or Genevieve?’

  ‘I don’t think so. After all, I suspect they adopted me thinking I was the illegitimate offspring of a respectable English or Scottish family.’

  ‘Was that how you were “sold” to him and his wife?’

  ‘Something of the kind. I feel sure they never knew I was abducted.’

  ‘Abducted, eh? Maybe that would have worried Jürgen.’

  ‘I’m sure it would. He was a worrier because he was a man of conscience. He worried because he was a survivor when almost all his fellow German-Jewish children were gassed. He worried about many of the things done by the state of Israel. So he would have worried if he had learnt – and I think he did learn, in a nasty encounter with my birth father – how he and Genevieve came to be my parents by believing a lie, credible though that lie was.’

  ‘Rest his bones,’ said Erheim, with the touch of cynicism in his voice that had by now become endemic. ‘I don’t know what worriers do in Heaven, if it exists. Now I must have my afternoon nap – my siesta. I have another visitor tonight … You know, I have many visitors, mostly Austrian or German people by origin, anxious to know the fates of their ancestors or relatives. I tell them, most of them, that I know nothing about their relative, but the likelihood is they suffered the common fate of European Jews. I say it more gently than I said it to you. But you know, I have never before been asked about Walter Greenspan. You are the first. And who knows how many offspring he left behind him, eh?’