Diane von Furstenberg

by Gioia Diliberto

  The basement of the building houses Diane’s vast archive, a half century of fashion and personal history—racks of dresses, stacks of plastic bins holding fabric swatches, diaries, and letters—all meticulously organized by Diane’s longtime archivist, an Italian linguist, who, as a student in the 70s, worked as Diane’s au pair.

  Diane von Furstenberg: A Life Unwrapped traces her life in detail to 2001, the year Diane married Diller. As the title attests, I’ve been most interested in exploring the forces and people that shaped Diane. I cover the last fourteen years—which have been well documented by the fashion press—more glancingly in the epilogue.

  This is the story of how Diane became DVF. It begins in Brussels with a young woman who survived against all odds to become Diane’s mother.

  Lily

  Fifteen days after being freed from the Neustadt concentration camp at the end of World War II, Lily Nahmias arrived home in Brussels, stumbling off a train in scuffed soldier’s boots, her emaciated body hidden under the olive-drab uniform a GI had given her to cover her rags. When her fiancé, Leon Halfin, saw Lily, then twenty-two, he couldn’t believe she was the same woman he’d fallen in love with two years before. She sensed Leon’s revulsion at her ravaged appearance—though he never said anything—and offered to release him from his promise to marry her. But Leon, an electronics salesman ten years Lily’s senior, was a man of honor, and the marriage went ahead as planned. When Lily gave birth to a perfect little girl on New Year’s Eve, 1946, she felt reborn herself. And for Leon, who’d lost most of his family in the war, the birth “turned life into gold. It started all my good luck,” he later said. The new parents named their daughter Diane Simone Michelle. She was their miracle baby, their revenge on the sorrow and horror of the past.

  With Diane’s birth, the beautiful life Lily had envisioned once again seemed within reach. She’d been born in Salonika, Greece, in 1922 and had emigrated with her parents and two older sisters to Brussels when she was seven. Her father, Moise, worked for Maison Dorée, the most luxurious textile shop in the city—a relative of Lily’s mother, Diamante, owned the shop. The family lived in bourgeois comfort at 45 rue de la Madeleine in a posh part of town. Lily was completing high school at the Lycée Dachsbeck in May 1940 when the Germans occupied the city.

  Lily, her mother’s sister, Line, and Line’s husband, Simon Haim, owner of the Maison Dorée, joined the exodus of Belgian Jews to Toulouse in the unoccupied part of France. One day, Simon Haim brought Lily to a meeting with an exuberant, dark-haired Russian émigré, Leon Halfin, who was acting as a broker to exchange money for the refugees. Leon had arrived in Brussels in 1929 at seventeen. He had planned to become a textile engineer, but when his father’s textile business in Kishinev went bankrupt, he gave up his dream of attending university. He went to work, eventually finding a job with Tungsram, the Hungarian manufacturer of vacuum tubing and lightbulbs.

  Leon was living in a hotel in Toulouse, hustling work while waiting out the occupation. He and Lily struck up a friendship. Then word came from Brussels that it was safe to return—the Germans weren’t mistreating anyone—and so everyone packed their bags and went home.

  Soon after, the Germans ordered all the Jews in Brussels to register at Gestapo headquarters on avenue Louise. On December 19, 1940, Mosche Nahmias dutifully recorded the birth dates and other biographical information about himself, his wife, and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Lily, in the Gestapo register. By this time, Lily’s eldest sister, Juliette, was married and living with her husband, Darius Levi, and their small son above the lingerie shop they owned at 15 rue Haute. Another sister, Mathilde, lived in Paris with her Spanish husband.

  The stories of German tolerance that had drawn the Nahmiases back to Brussels quickly proved unfounded. German soldiers patrolled the streets, checking identity papers, sometimes pulling on the yellow Stars of David Jews were required to buy for five francs and wear at all times. If the cloth stars had been loosely basted instead of sewn on and came off easily, the soldiers would issue fines to the offenders and sometimes arrest them. Jews disappeared in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. Jewish musicians, doctors, teachers, judges, and salesmen lost their jobs.

  Because of the German race laws, Lily was not allowed to attend university, as she had hoped. Instead, she enrolled at a trade school in Brussels and trained to become a modiste, a ladies hat maker. By now Leon Halfin had left Tungsram and fled to Switzerland. “My father was not the sort of person who could hide in someone’s house and wait for the war to be over. So he took the risk of fleeing,” says Philippe Halfin, Diane’s brother.

  Leon packed a few clothes and stashed a trove of gold coins in his socks. Diane still has them, and when she feels anxious—before a fashion opening, say—she tapes one into each of her shoes. Leon traveled with a Christian girlfriend named Renée. At the Swiss border, police confiscated his money (it was returned to him when he left the country after the war) and kept him under surveillance as a Jewish refugee. Within no time Renée eloped with a Swiss policeman, and Leon began to think of the pretty girl he’d met in Toulouse. He wrote Lily a letter, which reached her by chance.

  Before the war, she had been the adored baby in the family, so sheltered that her parents would not let her leave the house to go shopping without a chaperone. But when the family returned from Toulouse, her parents sent Lily to live with a Christian couple in Auderghem, outside Brussels. They probably did not know that the husband and wife were resistance workers for whom Lily acted as a courier, delivering false identity papers to Jews trying to escape Brussels. One day, when she was making her rounds on her bicycle, Lily decided to visit her family home on rue de la Madeleine. As soon as she entered the building, she had a feeling of lightness, as if the roof had been removed. Her parents were gone and the apartment was empty, all of the furniture and valuables stolen.

  The Nazis had driven the Nahmiases out. One night a few weeks earlier, a pounding on the door of their apartment came so loudly that Lily’s parents could feel it in their stomachs. A swarm of Nazis rushed in, knocking over lamps and tables, rummaging through drawers and cupboards, and stashing silverware in their pockets. The couple was forced to move in with their daughter Juliette on rue Haute, adjacent to the commercial district, which had been designated the Jewish zone. Cold with panic, Lily fled the building, glancing in the mailbox on her way out. It held a single letter—Leon’s.

  Within no time, hundreds of pages flew back and forth between the young lovers. For Lily, life in Brussels had become a shimmer of fear, with the only moments of calm provided by Leon’s letters. He poured out his heart to her: This will be over soon; we will get through it and be together. In one letter, Leon proposed marriage; in her response, Lily accepted. Diane still has the letters, marked with a thick blue vertical line in the margin, indicating that they had been cleared by the censors.

  Since they’d been born in Salonika under Turkish rule, and since Turkey was neutral in the war, Diamante and Moshe Nahmias held a measure of protection—the Germans weren’t arresting Jews with Turkish passports. But Lily had been born while Salonika was under the rule of Greece, which was now at war with Germany. Late on the night of May 5, 1944, during a routine roundup, Brussels police wearing swastika armbands nabbed Lily in the apartment where she’d been living. In subsequent days she managed to write a couple of notes to her parents, which somehow reached them. “I think a lot about you. That’s what makes me courageous,” she had scrawled on a piece of cardboard. “I love you so much. Excuse me if I’ve ever given you any trouble.”

  The same day of Lily’s arrest, Diamante and Moshe Nahmias were sent to an internment camp in a former old-age home in Scheut, a suburb of Brussels, where they were imprisoned with other Jews whose Turkish passports, wealth, high status, or friendship with the Belgian queen Elisabeth dissuaded the Nazis from deporting them to concentration camps. They remained there until November 1944, after the liberation of Belgium.

  Meanwh
ile, Juliette and her husband had gone into hiding at the home of Christian friends. They notified Leon in Switzerland of Lily’s arrest, writing in code: Lily has been hospitalized, and we are praying for her.

  The bare facts of Lily’s arrest and imprisonment were recorded by the Nazis in meticulous ledgers that have been preserved at the Musée Juif de Belgique in Brussels. She remained in prison in the town of Malines for ten days, leaving on May 17, 1944, on Convoy 25, the second-to-last to transport Jews out of Belgium to German concentration camps. It carried 507 men, women, and children; Lily was prisoner number 407. Her postage-stamp-sized picture, pasted in the Nazi record book with pictures of 25,000 other deported Belgians, shows a lovely young woman with light, wavy hair dressed in a fitted coat and scarf. Throughout her life, the first thing people noticed about Lily was her smile, dazzlingly warm and bright. In almost every picture that survives of her she is smiling. Not in this one.

  On the journey to Auschwitz, Lily attached herself to a motherly older woman. She clutched the woman’s hand as the cattle car lumbered to a halt on May 19, and the prisoners scrambled to the ground. When the Nazi in charge directed the older woman to join a group on the left, Lily followed, and the guard allowed it. But a higher-ranking Nazi standing by in a white coat, whom Lily came to believe was Josef Mengele, ordered her into the group on the right. He saved her life—the 108 Jews in the group on the left were immediately gassed.

  In the barracks, Lily overheard anguished voices. “Do you smell the crematorium? We’re all going to die!” She covered her ears, refusing to descend to the pit of despair. She thought of her parents and Leon and felt the power of their love and prayers.

  At Auschwitz she worked in a bullet factory and recalled later that she made the bullets badly so they’d malfunction. Lily had been at the camp eight months when, on January 17, 1945, as the Allied armies closed in, the SS command in Berlin sent orders to Auschwitz to execute all prisoners. In the chaos of the German retreat, however, the order was not honored, and the Nazis began moving prisoners out. At the end of a long, frigid march in the snow, Lily ended up at Ravensbrück, a woman’s camp fifty-six miles north of Berlin. From there, she was sent to one of its satellites, Neustadt-Glewe which was described by one prisoner as “the worst of the worst of the worst,” with unimaginably sordid barracks, so crowded there was no room to lie down at night, and walls black with lice. In the two and a half months that Lily was there, from February 18 to May 8 an average of seventy prisoners a week died from starvation or illness; others were sent back to Ravensbrück to be gassed. One survivor described the piled bodies as “a huge mountain of corpses two meters tall.”

  Lily awoke from a fitful sleep on May 5 to find the German guards gone, while a group of men—who, from their rags and ravaged physiques, appeared to be former prisoners—worked with tools on the electrified fence surrounding the camp. Suddenly, the gates opened, and Lily and her fellow prisoners were free. Wandering the countryside, she was picked up by a group of US soldiers patrolling the area. She was hospitalized for a week at an American base. When she was well enough to travel, the Americans sent her home.

  Thanks to her mother’s ministrations, which included feeding her bits of food every few minutes, Lily quickly gained back some of the flesh she’d lost as a prisoner. In a picture taken on her wedding day in November 1945, a month after being reunited with Leon, she looks thin but mostly restored to the stylish, brown-eyed beauty she’d been before the war. The wedding was like a dream, the town hall filled with friends and flowers, the bride and groom standing in front of the justice of the peace. At that moment, all they desired was to be together. Like many couples who married in the wake of the Holocaust, Lily and Leon were united by their powerful sense of renewed life. As it turned out, though, this would not be enough to sustain them, and eventually they’d be wrenched apart by the stronger force of the horror they’d endured. They would stay married for sixteen years, but it would be a troubled union, scarred by wounds that wouldn’t heal.

  THE LIFE THAT LILY AND Leon embarked on with baby Diane was both a denial of and a rebuke to the war. Leon started his own business dealing in electronic tubing, which at that time was a vital component of most electronic devices from radios and TVs to radar systems. He didn’t diversify; he focused on one product and became Europe’s major supplier. With the birth of Diane’s brother, Philippe, in 1952, the family was complete. The Halfins moved into a penthouse apartment at 80 avenue Armand Huysmans in Ixelles, a middle-class Brussels neighborhood of large, comfortable apartment buildings across from a vast park, the Bois de la Cambre. The area must have been a force field of style. Audrey Hepburn, born in 1929, spent the first years of her life a few blocks away on rue Keyenveld.

  Diane’s mother “wasn’t a fashion person; she didn’t talk about fashion,” says Diane. Lily always dressed beautifully, however. She patronized a couturier in Brussels who copied clothes by Paris designers and wore cashmere and jersey garments from the shop owned by her sister Mathilde off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. Lily also owned a sable coat, which she’d bought with her reparations check from the German government. For Lily, beautiful clothes were a way of beating back sadness and celebrating life. Clothes mattered because they were frivolous. To be alive and free to buy a fur coat was a gift.

  Lily’s elegance was accompanied by a powerful intuition and curiosity about people. “Lily was extremely sensitive,” says Diane’s girlhood friend Mireille Dutry. “She could tell if something wasn’t right in your life just by looking at your face.” Adds Diane’s brother, Philippe, “My mother always gave very good advice. She had impeccable judgment.”

  When Lily first caught the teenage Diane smoking, instead of lecturing her about how bad cigarettes were for her health, she said, “‘Wouldn’t it be more interesting to be the only one who didn’t smoke?’” Diane recalled. “I was so anxious to be individual that I just quit.”

  But for all Lily’s spirit, she suffered from serious depression. “Lily had post-traumatic stress disorder really badly,” says her granddaughter, Diane’s daughter, Tatiana.

  Many studies over the years have documented the high incidence of PTSD among survivors of the Holocaust. Few of these survivors received psychiatric help, and their problems only intensified over time. Lily’s psychological and emotional difficulties were compounded by physical ones, also results of her wartime trauma, particularly malnutrition. “She had a lot of pain in her body, and her eyes were awful,” says Tatiana.

  Hardly a day went by that Diane didn’t see her mother cry. “It must have been so hard to not ask anything of your mother because you didn’t want to put any pressure on her because she’s so frail and broken,” says Tatiana.

  The doctor who examined Lily before her wedding warned her that childbirth in her frail state might kill her. When Lily discovered she was pregnant, she and Leon tried to induce a miscarriage by taking long, jarring rides on Leon’s motorcycle over the cobblestone streets of Brussels. It had no effect, and Lily was secretly relieved. Later, when Leon brought home some pills that were supposed to induce a miscarriage, Lily threw them out the window. She had begun to feel a deep yearning for her unborn child, a belief that the baby would be her lifeline. “If I hadn’t been born, my mother might have killed herself,” Diane wrote in The Woman I Wanted to Be.

  Leon, Diane’s father, “was another traumatized person, another broken heart,” says Tatiana. He never got over losing his family in the war, and he compensated by becoming a workaholic. “He never stopped working,” adds Philippe.

  Though Diane has never consulted a psychotherapist, some experts might connect the insecurity that has plagued her throughout her life to her mother’s experiences during the war. Perhaps Diane internalized Lily’s fear and sorrow. Perhaps Lily’s fragility gave Diane a sense of instability, a feeling that the ground could shift beneath her at any moment.

  At the same time, however, Diane showed traits of exceptional resilience that re
searchers have also noted in the children of Holocaust survivors, including adaptability, tenacity, initiative, and street smarts. These were qualities that Diane shared with Leon.

  Indeed, in temperament, she is much more like her father than her mother. Leon “never saw limits. Diane is the same way,” says Philippe. “She got her strength from him. It’s like you have a certain model of car, and then years later a new version comes out, which is an improvement. This is how I think of [Diane and Leon]. No one has energy like those two. It’s the kind of energy that can move mountains.”

  “There was very little darkness in my father,” adds Diane. “He liked to work, eat, and make love.” He was awesomely successful at his job, and he adored Diane and Philippe. Of course, he loved Lily, too, but he often seemed indifferent to her suffering. “He didn’t want to acknowledge her wounds, so he ignored them,” wrote Diane. She has no doubt that Leon slept with other women when he traveled, but “that was not the problem between my parents,” she wrote. The problem was “his insensitivity toward” Lily.

  Affectionate and boisterous, Leon drove a big blue convertible Chevy at a time when American cars were a rarity on the streets of Brussels. He embarrassed his children at parties and weddings by singing loudly, sometimes in his exuberance picking up glasses off the table and smashing them on the floor. “He loved Diane intensely,” says Philippe, “more than any other man ever would.”

  Years later, when Diane returned to Brussels a celebrity, Leon would meet her at the airport with a huge bouquet of red roses. Once, without warning Diane, Leon called Le Soir, Brussels’ most important newspaper, to invite a photographer to his house to take a picture of him with his famous daughter.