The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Adversities, the good fairy, the magic gift: the story of Fred Stein seems a fable that is heading toward a happy ending, and maybe not even he, emphasizing the role of the Leica, told it exactly right. Camera, trust, perseverance, and a bold spirit wouldn’t have been sufficient for him to emerge among the hundreds of photographers who poured into Paris. The same goes for Capa and Gerda, even though they had thought up their millionaire fable with the ambition of establishing themselves as photojournalists. Creating art didn’t enter into their job, but they knew what the quality of a photo depended on: they had absorbed the aesthetic ideas of the time along with the political and social ones, and were aware that right there, in art, a revolution had taken place. Fred Stein, involved in politics since he was a high-school student, active member of a small socialist party, brilliant law graduate, hadn’t brought only an easy-to-use camera in his luggage. In Dresden he would have liked to be a lawyer for the weakest and, once in Paris, he photographed workers, peddlers, beggars—the poor in general. Yet that says nothing about how he did it: with respect joined to the ironic gaze, with the modernist rigor of the frames, with the particular aesthetic sense that coincided with his sense of justice.

  And then Paris took care of shaping his photographs. You had only to go to the café and you’d meet Cartier-Bresson or André Kertesz, with whom the younger André had excellent relations. Walter Benjamin also loved the Dôme, when he was a Berliner in love with Paris and not yet a refugee avoiding the jumble of German émigrés. But still he headed there as soon as he left his den on Rue Bédard, as might have happened the day Fred Stein took the photo of André and Gerda. Besides, the editorial office that in the spring of ’36 is waiting for a proof that has been much discussed is in Saint-Germain, and maybe on returning Benjamin needs to stop outside and have a glass.

  In June, when The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction begins to be on the lips of the Paris intellectuals, the author holds two meetings in German circles, one at the Deutscher Klub, the other at Café Mephisto. Gerda, who often takes advantage of these free opportunities for culture, is occupied by commitments to the Alliance agency and by the efforts to sell her first photograph. But how did Fred Stein, who has already taken portraits of Ernst Bloch and Bertold Brecht, to name two close friends of Benjamin’s, allow those occasions to get away? Or was it Benjamin who wouldn’t agree to be photographed? And when in New York Fred hears talk about him from Hannah Arendt—whose friendship is demonstrated by the photographs he takes of her over the years—surely that lapse must have weighed on him?

  It’s likely that Stein had read Benjamin’s essay, having grown up in a house full of books and precepts. His father a reform rabbi, his mother, left a widow, a teacher of Hebrew and religion. With the Torah closed so that he could open himself to socialism, for Stein all the faces had taken the place of He who had created him in his own image and likeness. In an article of ’34, he writes that a portraitist must capture “the story and the character that every model possesses,” an ideal task for the Leica, whose small size makes it so “disarming.” The consistency with which he translates that thought into method is remarkable: not only does he choose subjects whom he respects and likes but before meeting them he takes the time to study their works and then to talk in such a way that they forget it’s a session.

  The most exemplary episode dates to 1946, when Einstein allows him ten minutes and ends up talking to him for two hours. The result is barely twenty-five stills. In the portrait, which becomes one of the most famous, Albert Einstein has a gentle, sorrowful gaze, and isn’t smiling. An image that aims at capturing a man’s story and character has to be able not to reduce him to a mirror or an object, even if he is the most attractive of icons.

  The friend who that day finds André and Gerda so absorbed that he captures them at once is one who pours those aspirations into the portrait. If Stein didn’t believe he’d caught a moment of truth on their faces, the photo at the Dôme would perhaps have sunk into the limbo of negatives that do not rise as images, but instead now you, too, can look at it, as if the time that has passed since that moment didn’t exist.

  So you imagine that Fred and Lilo withdraw to develop the rolls. There’s some work done on commission, photos to offer the newspapers, and the portrait of André and Gerda. Fred observes the negative under the magnifying glass and finds confirmation of the sensation that he’s hit the bull’s-eye: the composition balanced, no detail too out of focus. “You see here?” he says to Lilo pointing to the waiter in the right place. “And look at the man smiling . . . Marvels of the Leica that captures what you don’t have time to notice.” Then he adds: “Lilo, you’re sensitive to the subject, how would you define this face? Arrogant? Scoundrelly?”

  It’s no longer the Montmartre house, but the darkroom is still the apartment’s small bathroom. The light is minimal, the space, too, the wait for the images to appear in the trays on the sink always magical.

  Fred touches Lilo’s arm and she responds that it’s really true: “André came out just the way he is. Power of love and the photographer who caught him on the spot.”

  “Let’s make a print right away, so I can bring it to him.”

  Lilo, waiting to take it out, looks at it more carefully. “And Gerda?”

  “Gerda, why?”

  “She didn’t come out well.”

  “The photo yes,” Fred replies. “And then I’ve taken so many where she’s stupendous, spirited, in other words Gerda . . . ”

  “Exactly.”

  Fred now reconsiders the portrait from that inevitable female perspective. The beret that covers her hair cuts across her forehead, shortening it, and accentuates the protuberance of her straight nose. And those hamster-like cheeks. Eyes closed, the shadow of the visor that almost creates the effect of a double chin—and she cares so much about her profile, Gerda, who as soon as she woke up did gymnastic exercises in their living room, torture and delight of the other tenants.

  “She won’t be very happy,” he grumbles.

  Now it’s Lilo who insists that the photograph should be delivered. It’s beautiful, a beautiful memory, a beautiful gesture of friendship, something that a person who is vain but not at all stupid can certainly recognize.

  And then?

  Then Fred returns home and says that it went as predicted. Gerda who sees herself as ugly, André who snatches the envelope off the table at the Dôme (“This, mein Schatz, I’ll take”). Anyway she’s the one who thanks him when he gets ready to leave: “Dear Fred, you were thoughtful, as always.”

  Was she sincere? Or did she just want to make her companion believe he’d had it his way, so that he would forget the photograph and never mind if it disappeared in the next move?

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Lilo, “you did what you had to. And then with André things get lost anyway. For a future memory, we have it.”

  This is a first conjecture, but it’s equally possible that the photo remained with the Steins waiting for an occasion to be delivered to André and Gerda. They’re all absorbed by the campaign of the Front Populaire, and then by the electoral victory. In May, Fred takes a picture of Prime Minister Léon Blum and sells it to Life for a thousand dollars, which they can live on for a month. In June a mass of work arrives with the wave of strikes and, in the blink of an eye, they’re into the great celebration of Quatorze Juillet, suddenly remembering the portrait still in the delivery drawer.

  “I’ll leave the envelope with the concierge if I don’t find them, I’ll do it this week,” Fred promises.

  But then a mere three days pass and July 18th arrives, when the euphoria of the 14th is upended into shock that a fascist coup is under way in Spain. Fred runs out, finds his friends at the café, excited by imminent departure, and, with the warmest wishes, finally takes out that envelope. They’re happy with their portrait, they find it auspicious, but they’re already elsewhere, André and Gerd
a.

  Then there’s a story that that photograph can’t tell, because it begins on September 3, 1939, when France declares war on Germany. Drôle de guerre, the French call it, since for eight months nothing happens to them, but that’s not the case for men whose nationality is that of the enemy, even if it’s to escape the Nazis that they came to France. On September 5, 1939, Fred Stein is transported to the stadium of Colombes, which is overflowing with German and Austrian refugees, and sent from there to the first of various internment camps. He paves French roads until, in June of 1940, the strange war becomes a debacle for the nation that hosts him as a prisoner. In the shame of the imminent surrender, an officer solves the problem of their boches, whom the Germans are just waiting to knock off: “Les allemands sont là, débrouillez-vous.” Fred gets the order to fend for himself, escapes through the countryside, shelters in abandoned farmhouses, covers six hundred kilometers to reach Toulouse. He has no news of Lilo, who’s in Paris with a child of less than a year. Marion was born so close to the fateful September 3rd that the process begun with the help of the Salzburgs, relatives of Lilo’s who emigrated to America after Kristallnacht, is useless. The most tormenting thing is that the one who organized the mother and daughter’s return to the city, raising hell to get a license, was him. In Normandy stateless people were not accepted among the evacuees. The orphanage that eventually took them in keeps Lilo in the cellars, allowing her minimal contact with her daughter. The child is wasting away, without the care and mother’s milk that would soften the privations of the religious institution.

  Now that he has no idea of where they are hiding, he tries the most unsuspicious way of communicating that he’s alive. He lines up at the window for advertisements, where he dictates only names that pass for French: even Stein is associated with the flight of the Alsatians, who swell the columns of the newspapers with the search for relatives. “Alfred Stein, demobilisée a Toulouse, cherche sa femme Lilo e sa fille Marion.”

  His wife doesn’t see that advertisement. But one of two postcards that Fred has sent to his most trusted contacts she receives on a date that she will remember for the rest of her life: July 9, 1940. She has to move quickly, she can’t wait to get there, only it’s so difficult. There’s the child, there’s the indispensable baggage, a suitcase full of negatives and prints that contains too many heads sought by the Nazis. How can she carry both through the occupied zone and then the “free zone” that, for someone like Lilo, isn’t free at all?

  Ever since Maréchal Pétain established the seat of government in a Grand Hotel at a spa to offer his services to the occupiers like a maître d’, his gendarmes and private citizens have been divided into those who are eager waiters, carrying plates to the Gestapo, and those who secretly spit on them. It means you can’t trust anyone you don’t know well, and Lilo Stein doesn’t know anyone outside of Paris. So she rushes into a game in which she gambles everything. She carries the child in her arms and, with the help of Marion, who threatens to wail, like a hungry nursing baby, she skips the line at the Kommandantur. The father of the petite gosse is demobilized in Toulouse, S-T-E-I-N she pronounces with an élan so Parisian that the official doesn’t even ask for her documents. Rewarded with a pass bearing the Nazi cross for a courage that surpasses the imagination of the German, Liselotte Stein née Salzburg gets on the train with Marion. And when, finally, she can put down the suitcase and be held tight by Fred, in that embrace there is a kind of spark, a jolt of almost criminal pleasure. Now they are reunited, yes, but stuck in Toulouse. To get out of the bottleneck of France requires endless visas, which governments are increasingly stingy with, or which have to be paid for at a very high price, and the Leica that might have been used to pick up some money was requisitioned while Fred was in prison. If Vichy hadn’t implemented a “delivery on request” to the Gestapo and Fred hadn’t appeared on the lists of those sought, they could ask for an exit visa, reach Portugal, get in contact again with Lilo’s family in the United States. Time presses, Marion has acquired her first words, which could betray them, but it’s torture to keep her in the chicken coop where they’ve found lodging. Finally a glimmer of hope reaches them, a rumor that seems reliable. Fred has to go to Marseille and track down the American Emergency Rescue Committee, where a certain Monsieur Fry is expanding a list received in Manhattan: two hundred great names in art, literature, and science that America, selective, as is suitable for the highest bidder, wants to grab in the liquidation sales of the old continent. “SAVE CULTURE EUROPE STOP,” a telegram from Varian Fry repeats with the peremptoriness of a cry that doesn’t stop at the desideratum. The excess of zeal (what is a Harvard classics graduate doing mixed up in current affairs?) risks damaging relations between France and America. And this to bring to the Land of the Free and the Brave an anomalous wave of Jews and extremists, whom no one feels any need of—not the State Department, and the American people even less. Varian Fry ignores the calls that are increasingly indistinguishable from threats, spends discreetly the dollars intended for saving chosen persons, procures false documents, considers clandestine paths and dilapidated boats that have become more expensive than a transatlantic liner. He doesn’t have the ability to prevent what can still go wrong, producing sometimes irreparable results, as when, annihilated by the non-validity of his transit visa, Walter Benjamin kills himself. The passeurs will have to leave him in Port Bou, given that the next day the Spanish will let the other refugees continue. Fry can’t even help all those who line up at his office, the lawyers and doctors who appear, imploring him with the terror of middle-class men reduced to the last family jewels. Fred Stein instead finds help because of what he has become: a photographer, an artist of the Leica. He can return to Toulouse and report to Lilo, not too loud but with the erotic warmth of a promise, the word that the American emissary has given him.

  Lilo carries the baby, Fred the suitcase. Or vice versa. Maybe Marion prefers to be in Papa’s arms, while her mother drags the anthology of photographic work thanks to which they now have American visas and passage on a boat direct to Martinique. Safety, fingers crossed. Varian Fry, on the pier at the port of Marseille, signals the vigilance of a great nation, in case the authorities venture to pull out one of his protected. In the group on the boat are other photographers, like the famous Josef Breitenbach, much tested by prison, and their friends Ilse Bing and Ylla. But they meet many people they know, among whom Willy Chardack turns up. They’re as packed in as prisoners, but in compensation the Winnipeg has the reputation of a “ship of hope”: it carried to Chile two thousand Spanish refugees extracted from the camps of the Midi. That’s why the hold of the old cargo ship is crammed with bunk beds, a golden opportunity for the French steamship company that in ’39 refitted it in order to crowd in the Republican refugees.

  Pablo Neruda will extoll that voyage on the Winnipeg, which he organized to evacuate the two thousand exiled Spaniards from the French camps, as the only one of his poems that no one would ever be able to erase, but in recent years a stain has marked that indelible work. In his capacity as special consul for immigration in Chile, Neruda chose to put on board mostly Communists. Fred Stein photographs the poet in ’66, mindful of the ship and hope, but on May 6, 1941, he sees nothing of what will happen behind him or beyond the horizon of sky and water that opens the future. The numbered months of Varian Fry, who, under United States pressure, will be expelled from France in early August. The fact that the Winnipeg is one of the last ships to leave a French port. It doesn’t land on Martinique, because the British reroute it to Trinidad, where Fred again ends up in a camp for “enemy aliens,” separated from Lilo and Marion. But on June 6th the S.S. Evangeline, a ship on which one travels as comfortably as if it were a normal thing to go on a journey, delivers them finally to Ellis Island.

  If Capa had been in New York in that period, maybe the Steins would have discovered that the person who issued his visa for America was, coincidentally, Pablo Neruda. They could have exchanged sto
ries of their mishaps, relieved by having had to choose only the contents of a suitcase, a choice much less thorny than that of Varian Fry, Neruda, and whoever applied a selective criterion to those who had to flee and, even so, can never be thanked enough. But the archive in Amsterdam where Lilo managed to send Fred’s more political work will be burned by the bombs with which the Allies reconquer Holland, and many of Robert Capa’s negatives will never reappear. But the photo at the Café du Dôme, arriving at the port of New York, is safe.

  The drôle de guerre exposes Capa to a tragicomic reversal. From early September of ’39 he offers himself to the French military authorities, but they will not accept the services of someone who has worked for the Communist press. Ever since Hitler and Stalin made the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (sending the Spanish to despair and the International Brigades to the refugee camps and their German comrades sheltering in the USSR directly to the Nazis), in France the Communists—the Party, the newspapers, etc.—have been outlawed. At that point he is not only an “undesirable foreigner” but a rather visible foreigner. They could, overnight, deport him to one of the camps reserved for politicals, the best guarded and harshest. In a frantic search for a way out, Capa spends his time making phone calls and running around Paris. His contacts at Paris-Soir and Match say they are très désolés, but there is absolutely no way to get him a visa. Even at Life all they do is fill him with compliments (“today you’re the number one war photographer”) and promise him assignments, if he can get around the United States immigration quotas. Given that the bourgeois press can do nothing for him, Capa remembers Pablo Neruda. They met during the siege of Madrid and maybe again after the defeat, on a joint visit to the tent cities held together by barbed wire, where the photographer no longer sees only a subject for an exposé but the looming image of his future. To help a comrade who had done so much for the Spanish cause was a small gesture for the Chilean consul, still full of emotion for his “great poem” docked in Valparaiso. From September 19, 1939, André Friedmann, Profesión: fotógrafo; Nacionalidad: húngaro; Estado Civil: soltero; Religión: no tiene, can therefore go en viaje comercial—on a business trip—to the Republic of Chile. Time, Inc., the colossus of capitalist information, will take care of the rest, reserving one of the last cabins on the Manhattan, departing from Le Havre. Capa reaches New York with a tourist visa for the USA, but he’ll have time to invent something when the expiration date approaches. Meanwhile he can toast his twenty-seven years just completed and collapse where Julia, his mother, or his brother, Cornell, direct him.