Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  “Eduardo has all the visas for all of us!” Mitzi understood what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was that he was willing and able to steer us to safety, evidently at the risk of his career. “If he’d wanted us to take a trip from Bordeaux to England we were ready to do it at once.” Some were trapped, for instance friends of hers who were unable to set off from Bayonne on a coaling ship because they did not have what she calls a military visa.

  The armistice on June 22 divided France. The unoccupied southern zone took its name of Vichy France from the spa where Marshal Pétain now set up his government. Those with reasons to be afraid of the Germans immediately fled there. To return to Royaumont would have meant living under German occupation and Max was receiving news of it that didn’t scotch the idea completely. I cannot identify the man whose signature looks like Jacquet, but he must have been an employee. One letter of his to Max on 13 July says that the complete evacuation of Royaumont had lasted six days. It wasn’t Germans but retreating French soldiers who had moved into the château, “leaving the disorder you can imagine.” German soldiers were having a good time fishing in the lake or swimming, but that was all. Ten days later he was reassuring Max that he’d been to the Kommandatur for advice, the property had suffered no damage to speak of, “the Germans, it must be recognized, are very correct.” Max’s other informant from Royaumont, Carlos Moore, a man of Spanish origins writing in French, had been the estate manager before Marcel Vernois. Having fled as far as Versailles in what he calls a caravan of sixty people, he too consulted the Kommandatur where he was told to go home. At Royaumont, he’d found the cows out on the road, all the doors of the house left wide open, but only the gramophone and some linen was missing. Franto, the Slovak odd-job man, was patrolling the estate with Attila, Max’s fierce dog.

  In a letter dated 25 June 1940 Jessie in Bordeaux brought Poppy in London up to date about what the others had decided. “Your mother left here with Frank this morning early, and in a short time she hopes to be with you. There was a lot of hesitation as to whether the boy ought to come but in the end she decided not, the risk was too great. Then Lily said she wanted to go to be with you, and that also was ruled out so here we are with none of our usual newspapers and the wireless and as we sit beside this instrument of torture we know you are listening to the same and this is the only tiny link we have at present.” Her closing exhortation was perhaps not as robust as usual. “We are not down-hearted. I wonder if you will get this and how soon?”

  “That terrible day of 25 June,” is Mitzi’s account. “We got up at 6.30. Packed. The girls sat with me. We gave each other addresses all over the world to meet at. Bubbles keeps having panics and the wish to leave Europe. Lily does not see how she could stand life away from Europe but also has panics sometimes. I did not go and see the babies who were still sleeping. I did not feel I could face it. The girls and nannies came to the car. Frank and I kissed each of them, we were all in tears. Will we ever see them again? I looked and looked at them as the car rolled away, my eyes and heart seemed to leave my body.”

  Whitworth drove them out across the frontier into Spain. In Madrid they found themselves among people whom they had known before the war – old Mrs David-Weill and her daughter Mrs Seligmann, Kitty Rothschild, Tricia Landau and her husband, Lucie Goldschmidt and her daughter Simone. Mr Esmond was with his daughter Lulu, Poppy’s old friend, and Lulu’s little daughter Emmeline. Mitzi portrays him, “This Indian Jew has always lived in real luxury and comfort,” and now is “a broken old man who has lost all his racehorses.”

  The talk was only of “visas, Clippers [flights to the United States], ships, dollars.” She quickly concluded that she couldn’t look after Bubbles and Lily, and didn’t expect them to look after her. Poppy and Alan had all they needed. Regulations prevented Hambros Bank from sending to Spain more than £150. With the permission of the National Bank of Slovakia, Pokorny had wired 300,000 Slovak crowns to New York. Soon Pokorny was communicating bad news. Geutebruch, supervisor of the sequestration of all she owned in Austria, was now in Paris living in the Hôtel de Castiglione. Going round to her flat in the rue de Surène, he had found it occupied by a Frenchman, a Monsieur Brunard. German soldiers were living in Montreuil and had gone through all her papers.

  As Jews, Max and Lily were forbidden to be on the board of the factory, and Geutebruch was trying to get in touch with them. The Gestapo had been asking for details about the Brauns and the Brülls. (Already in London, Brüll and his wife Erna expected to be interned any moment. On 12 July 1940 Brüll appealed to Granny Vere. They would not be in a concentration camp, he realized, but separated from their young son who was in Bournemouth. “I personally never had the idea to apply to Mr. Alan,” Brüll apologized, “but think Mr. Alan did not forget us and would do something in our favour if he could.” He hoped all was well with the Wooster family: “How happy I should be if I could be at their service in these difficult days.”)

  Jewish property in Slovakia was being expropriated, and Pokorny asks what he should do. “If we feel sure of our victory, he says, just wait and see. He believes England will be invaded and taken over but he does not know if this will stop the war. From where he is he cannot judge what the world thinks.” Mitzi answered that she was not of his opinion and would only sell the Slovak properties without the Teplà shares on condition of a single payment of 500,000 dollars in US currency to a New York bank. “Should England go down she will do so nobly, not like France” – in her view, the wish to do down the Jews was enough to make France pro-German. Her adopted identity led her to an unlikely flourish, “Our people are grand, led by our King and Queen.” When Frank called at the British Embassy, the ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare had said, “Are you worried about England? Don’t be. We are perfectly prepared now.”

  Lourenço Marques was a possible destination for some. Kurt Reininghaus and his wife Biba (née Springer, from Sitzenberg near Vienna) were on their way to Brazil. Mitzi suggested Canada or even the Azores, Frank preferred South Africa. In a telegram, Alan was anxious that Jessie and I were not safe, and he’d help financially for us to fly by Clipper to America with Mitzi and Frank and Lily in tow. Mitzi objected: first of all there were no seats on the Clippers till the end of September, some twelve weeks away. There was no money to pay for this trip for five people, and nothing for them to live on over there. Alan did not specify what financial help he could provide. Finally, it was virtually impossible to obtain visas.

  Mitzi and Frank moved from Madrid to Lisbon around the middle of July 1940 – at this point, her diaries carry even fewer dates than usual. Whitworth drove them one last time, and he then caught a ship to England. On 25 July 1940 at any rate, Mitzi and Frank settled into the house they rented, the Villa Preciosa at Estoril. She had never lived anywhere so nondescript, but was soon expressing a hope to spend the rest of the war there. Mitzi volunteered to do charity work packing up parcels, and greatly enjoyed it perhaps because this too was unlike anything she had ever done. Otherwise they settled into a routine of lunches and dinners in this or that restaurant and hotel, mostly yet again in the company of Jews with the means to pay to escape the Germans. However much she may have disliked Jews, she tells herself, at the present moment when they are blamed for everything, “I cannot help standing up for them. Oh, how bruised my heart is. The world is so ugly, such horrors everywhere.” The company she keeps in Lisbon is a roll-call of what had been smart Jewish society: Jacques Stern, Lucienne Kann, Rudi and Marianne Gutmann, the Pierre de Gunzbourgs, Michel and Dolores Porgès, Pamela Frankau the daughter of Gilbert Frankau, and so on. One day Raoul Helbronner turns up at the Avenida Bar to say he’s on his way to New York in order to propose marriage to Cécile de Rothschild (he was turned down) and another day she meets Poppy’s childhood friend Aline de Gunzbourg with her little boy Michel Strauss, they too off to New York.

  A flicker of cosmopolitanism survives when she entertains Somerset Maugham distressed by the fall of France (about which he wa
s writing a book), Noël Coward on his way back from Australia, two local correspondents, Moore of The Daily Telegraph and Lucas of The Times (no first names given), the anti-Nazi German Baron von Friesen and his wife Walpurga, Prince Radziwiłł and his wife formerly Princess Eugénie of Greece. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had stayed in Lisbon with Ricardo Espírito Santo, and Mitzi was “horrified” to hear from their relations, José Espírito Santo and his wife, that the Windsor woman hadn’t even sent flowers by way of thanks.

  In need of a power of attorney for Pokorny to deal with her affairs, she was obliged to apply in person to the German Embassy. In an atmosphere of embarrassment and hostility, she obtained the requisite document. Her visit to the Hungarian Legation took place on 1 August. She and the minister, André de Vodianer, talked politics as much as they dared. The future of the Balkans, they agreed, was changing from one day to another. Mitzi then asked about Trissolin (one of the horses that Alan and Poppy had seen in training at Lesvár). Mitzi had what was surely a unique experience for a refugee of learning that Trissolin had just won the Alagar Preis, the Hungarian Derby. Trissolin was unbeaten that season, and an article in a Hungarian newspaper congratulated “the little Baroness Mitzi” on winning all the big races even though the new anti-Jewish laws made life in Hungary impossible for her. Minister Vodianer came to dinner in November, and she quotes him saying that if Hitler took Palestine he would make it a Jewish national state. He also told her what other diplomats would have been glad to know, that Germany was already massing troops against the Soviet Union in order to save Europe from Bolshevism.

  What to do about me puzzled them all. Letters and telegrams with proposals and objections passed between Mitzi in Lisbon, Poppy in London, and Eduardo and Bubbles. Mitzi did not want to have to take me with her to Canada, but she was not happy that I stayed in France. “People coming from Nice say they are starting to starve there and that the Jews will be put into camps.” She wondered, “How will I ever get David and Jessie out?” Jessie refused to fly alone with me to Canada. If Mitzi was to take care of me she would have had to postpone departing from Lisbon, and she imagined Frank would blame her for paying attention to the children “if anything happened,” that is, if they were deported from Portugal or somehow forced back under Nazi rule. Visas and tickets, she said, were unobtainable but they obtained them all the same.

  Round about 10 June 1941, she and Frank sailed to New York on the Serpa Pinto, a Portuguese liner that had seen better days. No tears were shed when she threw off what she calls “poor mad Europe,” not even on quitting the Villa Preciosa that had so suited her. The other passengers on the voyage were a cross-section: 29 survivors of an Egyptian ship that had been torpedoed; a young rabbi, “dark, sad and upsetting;” Germans huddled in the third class “like animals,” playing the refugee card. Some woman misinformed her on 22 June that the Soviet Union had entered the war as Hitler’s ally – the ship’s captain put her straight. Next day, the ship docked at Pier B on Staten Island. She and Frank checked into the Best Western hotel on Fiftieth and the corner of Madison, where the charge was $225 a month. The year in Portugal had cost her $9,500. In New York she had $11,000 in the bank. The presence of Robert and Nelly de Rothschild, and their daughter Cécile, allowed her to pick up social life more or less where she had left it. But determined to live in the British Empire, they chose to spend the war in Montreal. The judgment she passed on herself after the change of continent is characteristic: “Mitzel Springer from Vienna, what different things you do and how you love it.”

  THIRTEEN

  Villa to Villa

  THE VILLA LES OEILLETS is on the Boulevard Alexandre III, a short walk down to the Croisette, the Cannes seaside so much more glamorous than Le Touquet’s Paris-Plage where Jessie had previously taken me. Built in stone in spacious and leafy surroundings, here is a summer-house that might have belonged to one of those Frenchmen advised by President Adolphe Thiers in the previous century to enrich themselves. Shallow steps lead up to the entrance. At the rear is a patio, slightly sunken. Out there one day, I somehow contrived to collapse the deckchair I was lolling on, pinching a finger and unable to lift my weight off it. A balcony on the first floor overlooks the patio. From time to time, a priest would call round, stand on that balcony and throw sweets to Elly and me below.

  Max rented this villa, and in mid-July 1940, a few days after we had arrived there, Jessie was writing to Poppy, “I hope in the near future I’ll be able to hand you over your saucy son, he’s grown and getting quite brown from the sea air here.” Letters, the one and only lifeline, had to be mailed via a neutral country. In Spain and then Portugal, Mitzi had the vital function of forwarding communications between Cannes and London. Inevitably, some letters went undelivered and some questions had to be left unanswered.

  Jessie’s letter of 19 July must have given Poppy as much reassurance as information. The opening paragraph declares, “I have never lost confidence in what England can, and will, do, but it will be a hard struggle.” Royaumont, she then says, so far is intact, with the Spanish flag flying over it, thanks to Eduardo. “Your mother is still in Portugal, very unhappy and I think it takes her all her time to keep the baby [Frank, that is] good-tempered, and I think perhaps she is beginning to understand that.” There follows one of the many quotes that she had memorised:

  Every man will be thy friend

  Whils’t thou hath wherewith to spend.

  But if the store of crowns be short

  No man will supply their want.

  A family discussion was to be held next day in order to see what was the best thing to do for the children. “For the time being, they are having a good fling here by the sea. I don’t know what you would say to see David going down to dinner after his bath at eight o’clock. He has breakfast in bed at nine o’clock, lunch at one o’clock. We are out until after seven o’clock sometimes, and he is not in bed much before 9.30 and he sleeps like a top. He has grown but not very fat, no!” Lily has just heard that Elie had been taken prisoner in the fighting at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. “I was so thankful I could have cried.”

  We were to spend the summer of 1940 from the end of July to early October at Zarouz, a resort on the Spanish coast, half an hour from San Sebastián. For Eduardo and his immediate family no particular formalities were involved. Jessie and Nanny Stainer could still travel legally on British passports and both may have been too old to be interned. Hitherto I had traveled on Poppy’s passport. This had been issued at the British Consulate in Paris and dated on the day of her wedding in December 1934. After crossing from Austria into Germany on 12 July 1935, she had acquired a page with swastika stamps. I am entered as her child as from 30 April 1936. Once the war had begun, she received special permits stating that she was returning to her mother at Montreuil but with the qualification, “This passport is not valid for any military zone overseas.” She was taking liberties. An Immigration official stamped her entry to Southampton on 4 February 1940. After that date, we were separated and I had no identification papers of any kind.

  In the course of innumerable conversations with Eduardo towards the end of his life, I never thought to ask how he had arranged for me to be waved across the frontier between France and Spain. For many, this was to be a matter of life and death. Some chose to find an illegal route over the mountains into Spain – Jacqueline Propper, a cousin, borrowed Lily’s ski boots for her long hike. The eminent literary critic Walter Benjamin was one among many denied entry – he committed suicide rather than face the consequences. I have to assume that Eduardo passed me off as Spanish, a relation, even his son.

  The Grand Hotel at Zarouz had a French owner, Madame Bringeon. Philip, then aged ten, remembers the deprivation and poverty left by the civil war. Children were barefoot. The hotel served only one good meal in the week. Out to reassure, Jessie on the contrary depicts “a lovely place, here, wonderful beach and the children are looking fine, good appetites and plenty to eat so far.” She had onl
y one criticism. “Any amount of sausages [i.e. Germans] walking about here, so we have to shut our eyes, ears and mouths.” German soldiers were allowed to wear their uniform in Franco’s Spain but not to carry side-arms. Jessie was sitting on a bench one day when one of them suddenly appeared and sat down next to her. Behind the bench was a concrete ramp which I used to run up from bottom to top. Playing at this, I saw Jessie turn to this soldier, and I heard her say in English, “Do you think I am going to sit next to you? Get off this bench at once.” Probably the sight of an angry old woman made him think he was doing something wrong. He stood up, saluted, and walked away.

  Elly and I climbed up that ramp, we paddled carefree in the sea and we built sandcastles and jumped on and off a rock shaped like a mouse. “He is having a glory time,” Jessie wanted Poppy to know. There I was speaking French to be able to play with boys who had no English. Merde was a word I was forbidden to use, but Jessie was pleased to pass on my retort, “I can think what you won’t let me say.” We were invited to a tea party in a local villa and I came back with the potato I’d won in the potato race. “He says he is going to marry Elly, she wants a real live baby and he will buy her one. I hope not.” Once when I was supposed to be having a siesta, I was watching Jessie sitting in a chair in our bedroom and soaking her feet in an enamel bowl full of water. Suddenly she unrolled her stockings. I piped up to ask what she was doing, and she answered that she was drowning the fleas that had gathered on her legs.