After his last visit to Bosbeek in the summer of 1938, my father, Bernard, then twenty-four, had returned to London to enjoy what was left of his youthful freedom. He understood that taking his art history degree at Cambridge had been all very fine, a properly broadening experience for a young gentleman, but making art a career was never a serious consideration. Sooner or later, just as Eugen had with Fritz, his father would insist that Bernard settle down in the ubiquitous family world of banking.
In the meantime, he was determined to enjoy himself—not a difficult objective for a good-looking, socially connected, and quite wealthy young man in prewar London. With a few well-heeled friends, Bernard rented a seventeenth-century house in fashionable Mayfair, on the corner of Charles Street and Waverton Street—probably the last original timber-fronted house in all of London. As the storm clouds gathered over Europe, the house on Charles Street soon developed quite a local reputation; it was said that all one had to tell any Mayfair cabdriver was “Take me to the party house!” and the driver would know exactly where to go.
The lull before the storm was short-lived. Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, left my father in a somewhat unusual position. Although still a Dutch citizen by law, he was concurrently by birth a British citizen. Nevertheless, the Gutmann family was strongly associated with the new enemy, Germany, and Bernard also had close family ties, through his sister and his aunts, with Britain’s soon-to-be enemy Italy. Certainly he was well aware of the persecutions his parents and other ethnic Germans, even those with British citizenship, had encountered in England at the outbreak of the First World War. He understood, too, that wartime passions could often override legalities, or even common sense.
His concerns were not misplaced. In the first days of the Second World War, around six hundred “enemy aliens” in Great Britain were interned. By May 1940 more than six thousand had been rounded up, some once again in camps on the Isle of Man, others shipped off to Canada and even Australia. Astonishingly, many of them were German and Austrian Jews who had recently fled persecution from Hitler, only to be considered potential allies of the Nazis by some mindless bureaucrat. Among them was Bernard’s cousin Luca, Herbert’s son, then living with Herbert and Daisy in their Park Lane apartment in London. Apparently Herbert’s and Luca’s association with the Anglo-German Union, whose members also included a number of prominent British Fascists, made them both suspect. Herbert, then suffering with throat cancer—his love of cigars had finally taken its toll—was allowed to remain free, perhaps because of his illness. A few years later, in 1942, the cancer would finally take his life. But Luca was arrested and shipped off to an internment camp in Canada, along with more than two thousand other German and Austrian refugees who had aroused suspicion. It was all quite absurd, given that Herbert had come within an inch of being executed by the Nazis, and Luca had been living in England for years without any suspicious activities—not to mention that they were, in Nazi eyes, Jews or at least half-Jews. But then, in war common sense is often the first casualty.
Even before the war began, my father began to anglicize himself. First he changed his name, by deed poll, from the official Bernhard Eugen Gutmann to the English translation, Bernard Eugene Goodman. Then, in January 1939, he enlisted as a private in the British army.
Bernard was placed with the Gloucestershire Regiment, one of those venerable British units that traced its origins back to the seventeenth century. Given his athletic ability and adventurous spirit, he volunteered for training as a commando. Meanwhile, his regiment, as part of the British Expeditionary Force, was fighting a valiant rearguard action before evacuating from Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. Tragically, this was the same German offensive that trapped Fritz and Louise in Holland.
My father had been eager to fight the Nazis. In January 1941, while on a training mission near the South Coast, he and some of his chums cadged weekend passes into town and checked into a hotel in Portsmouth. That night more than a hundred German bombers attacked the city. Being young and foolish, and feeling indestructible, my father stood on the second-floor balcony to watch the fireworks, instead of fleeing to an air-raid shelter. A German bomb landed close enough to blow him and the balcony across the street and onto the rubble below, breaking his back, several other bones, and cleaving off a portion of his right heel. His injuries would cause him pain for the rest of his life.
Bernard spent six months in a military hospital, much of it encased in a body cast and in traction for his spinal injuries. It was not at all certain that he would ever walk again. He had hoped to remain in service, but it was impossible. His army discharge noted that he was “permanently unfit for any form of military service.”
I think my father regretted that he had never been, through no fault of his own, in direct combat against the Nazis. So many of his friends had served with distinction, some even at the cost of their lives. Perhaps best known among them were the three MacRobert brothers, who had been Bernard’s best friends at Cambridge. Alasdair, Roderic, and Iain were the sons of Sir Alexander MacRobert, a Scottish millionaire, and Lady Rachel MacRobert. Alasdair died in a prewar flying accident while serving with the Royal Air Force, and Roderic and Iain both died heroically in action in 1941, while also serving with the RAF. In what became one of the fabled stories of World War II Britain, their grieving mother, Lady MacRobert, subsequently donated twenty-five thousand pounds sterling for the purchase of a Stirling bomber aircraft, which was named MacRobert’s Reply and sent into battle against the Germans. The RAF continued to name airplanes after the MacRobert brothers well into the 1960s. I remember as a boy my father telling me that he had been friends with the famous brothers, which I found incredibly exciting. The concept of MacRobert’s “revenge” seemed to give him particular satisfaction. But then, as usual, he slipped back into his thoughts; the memory of their young deaths seemed to return him to some silent, lonely place. I wonder now if, given his frustrations in life, he secretly wished that he had joined them.
After being invalided out of the army and with the war still on, Bernard looked about for something purposeful to do. His strength gradually returned. Through his connection with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the former Bosbeek guest who was now commander of the Free Dutch Forces in England, Bernard took a job with the free Dutch Red Cross. (This was not to be confused with the official Netherlands Red Cross, operating under German control in The Hague, which would collaborate with the Nazis in deliberately suppressing reports of the persecution of Dutch Jews.)
Bernard also returned to the house at 27a Charles Street in Mayfair, which, despite the war or perhaps because of it, remained a magnet for a steady stream of now-uniformed young men and attractive young women. Most seemed aware that life could be very short and must be enjoyed at all costs. The raucous parties in the distinctive wooden house took on an air of defiance.
Among the guests at one of those affairs was Irene Doreen Rosy Amy Simpson, later known as Dee, a vivacious, twenty-five-year-old recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She had just started working as a stage manager in a London theater. With a friend, she had been invited to the Charles Street house by a regular visitor there, Count Manfred von Czernin. He was a Berlin-born RAF ace whose English mother was a friend of the Simpson family’s and, coincidentally, whose brother had been a classmate of Bernard’s at Zuoz, in Switzerland. I do not know what Dee and Bernard’s first words together were, or whether it was a case of love at first sight across a crowded room. When I was young, I never thought to ask, and when I grew older, it was too late. But Dee obviously saw something in the handsome young man with the dark, sorrowful eyes, because in September 1943 they were married at a church in Mayfair.
During most of this time Bernard knew almost nothing about his family and what was happening across the Channel. Communication was impossible with his sister Lili, Uncle Max, or other members of the family in Italy. Bernard did discover, however, that his brother-in-law, Lili’s husband, Franco Bosi, was a POW of the British in North Africa. Through his Red Cross connections, Bernard was able to send Franco packages of spaghetti and other essentials. Years later Bernard was still joking about how an Englishman was sending pasta to the Italians. He sent similar “care packages” to his cousin Luca, who remained locked up in an internment camp in Canada until 1943.
The last word from Uncle Kurt was that he was living in Paris, a refugee from the Nazis, but there, too, the German occupation then severed all connections. As for his parents in Holland, Bernard could only wonder and agonize over how they were faring under Nazi control.
Not until August 1943 did the Knickerbocker Weekly, a New York–based free Dutch newspaper, publish a small item headlined “Banker Fritz Gutmann Arrested in Berlin.” The article said that “the former German banker Fritz Gutmann and his wife had been arrested by the Nazis in Berlin—although the Nazi authorities would give permission [to the couple] to travel to their daughter, living in Florence, providing they relinquish their entire possessions in return.” It was certainly ominous.
Given the general lack of knowledge in Britain about the true nature and extent of the Holocaust, Bernard might have been spared the full significance of what it meant when Jews were “arrested” by the Germans. Still, my father was overcome with a sense of foreboding. Much later, through International Red Cross contacts, he learned that Fritz and Louise had been taken to Theresienstadt. I doubt that he was reassured by its reputation as the “model” concentration camp.
Bernard must have followed with mounting despair the news in April 1945 when British and American army units first reached the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, giving the world the first documented revelations into the horrors they found there—hundreds of thousands already dead, along with thousands more almost dead. As the word spread of even worse sights at the extermination camps farther east—at Auschwitz and Sobibór and Treblinka—the sheer scale of the Nazi system of industrialized murder slowly began to sink in.
In the waning days of the war, Bernard had heard the radio reports, seen the newsreels, wondering all the while if his parents had been among those piles of emaciated corpses shown stacked up in ditches. He could not bear to look, yet he could not stop.
On May 7, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. The fighting in and around Theresienstadt still continued for a day or two, however. Obersturmführer Karl Rahm finally fled just as the Red Army moved in. Eventually the International Red Cross took control of Theresienstadt, and as at other camps, they began compiling lists of survivors. It was far easier to make lists of the survivors than of the dead. The lists of survivors were much shorter. In England Bernard sent out inquiries, monitored reports, and pored over the bulletins. Fritz’s and Louise’s names were not on them. There was no news—nothing.
Not many Jews were coming back. Out of a total Dutch Jewish population of about 155,000 in 1940, around 15,000 had fled just before the advancing German armies. Then from 25,000 to 30,000 had gone into hiding—nearly 10,000 of whom still perished. The vast majority of Dutch Jews, however, about 107,000, were deported from the Netherlands by the Nazis. Of those, only 5,200 survived.
• • •
Shortly after the end of the war, my brother Nicholas was born on November 18, 1945. Two days later the Nuremberg Trials began. Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Seyss-Inquart, Ribbentrop, and many more war criminals would be sentenced to death. Some, however, such as Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen, would be acquitted.
Then, on November 27, 1945, Pa finally received word from the Dutch Embassy that the restrictions on civilian travel to the Netherlands were being lifted. On that freezing November night, Bernard rushed to the Liverpool Street station, where he caught the night ferry to the Hook of Holland. As the wind whipped off the North Sea, my father set foot in the old country for the first time in over seven years. A lot had changed. He was not even Bernhard Gutmann anymore; now he was Bernard Goodman.
As soon as my father arrived in Amsterdam, he checked into the Schiller Hotel on the Rembrandtplein, along the Herengracht (canal). He had always liked the enormous hotel, famous for its Art Nouveau style, and just a block or so from his father’s offices. In the dimly lit lobby, he must have been the only one out of uniform. Still, when Bernard saw the entrance to the hotel’s Café Schiller, fond memories briefly came back as he remembered the tea and cakes—a treat as a schoolboy with his parents, a lifetime ago.
The next morning the Dutch Red Cross put my father in touch with a survivors’ organization. They gave him the number of Jo Spier. Pa remembered that, before the war, a famous artist and cartoonist had that same name. A few days later a very thin Jo Spier appeared at the Schiller Hotel. In 1943 he had witnessed the arrival of Fritz and Louise at Theresienstadt. A member of the ghetto Prominenten, Spier had known Fritz and Louise well. So it was Spier who finally told my father the story of his parents’ last days—the interrogations of Fritz, his refusal to give in, the staged “release” of the Gutmanns that ended in the Little Fortress, Fritz’s death by beating, and finally Louise’s deportation to Auschwitz.
After my father had read the one brief news story about his parents’ arrest in the Knickerbocker Weekly, and the ordeal of two and a half years of uncertainty and anxiety, he learned for the first time the true fate of Fritz and Louise. Somehow the gaunt artist was able to comfort my father (to a certain extent) with what he had to say. Bernard’s worst fears had been confirmed. The waiting was over.
I suppose that ever since the reports about the Nazi concentration camps had started to filter in, my father had suspected the truth. The hard facts had already begun to change him. The resulting scars left him with what today we recognize as “survivor’s guilt.” His inability to persuade his parents to flee Holland when there was still time, and that he had remained safely in England while his parents were under the Nazi heel, had haunted him—a broken back and shattered bones notwithstanding. The unattempted fantasy of an impossible rescue had left him with an unwarranted, but painful, sense of failure. The rest of England might be celebrating, but Bernard was slipping further into despair.
Then to compound his gloom, what Jo Spier had to tell my father next about his own reception in Holland, after returning from the camp, was almost as shocking, if that were possible. Despite the liberation from Nazism, anti-Semitism had clearly not disappeared in the Netherlands, and the few Jewish survivors, Spier explained, were becoming increasingly dejected.
As the pitiable remains of the Dutch Jewish community had begun to straggle back to Holland, a small few returned to find that their homes and property had been protected by sympathetic Dutch neighbors, who greeted them warmly. Others, the vast majority, returned to find everything they had once owned gone. Many bewariers, or “Aryan guardians,” to whom Jews had entrusted their possessions had long since sold everything or used them for their personal needs. Some so-called guardians openly complained, “Why did my Jew have to be the one to come back?” Their former friends and neighbors appeared openly hostile and suspicious, in some cases even blaming the Jews for causing the war and all of its accompanying misery. The Vrije Katheder newspaper, in July 1945, quoted some as grumbling, “It was a pity so many came back alive.”
Jews coming home from the camps were greeted at the Dutch border by delousing stations and a onetime government stipend of twenty-five guilders. In another example of Dutch insensitivity, for several months after the war a number of stateless Jews were locked up in the same camps alongside Nazis and their supporters.
The Dutch government’s official attitude was that Dutch Jews, as a group, represented no special case; apparently they had suffered no more than other Dutch citizens killed in the fighting or conscripted for labor in Germany. When Jews started looking for their lost property, statements began to appear in the Dutch press using anti-Semitic stereotypes, such as “Jews were money hungry.” Some Dutch officials stated that the Jewish community should seek “recognition . . . not money.” In other words the simple act of a Dutch Jew seeking restoration of his birthright had become, somehow, antisocial and even unpatriotic.
It quickly became apparent that legal restitution to the Jews would be in actual conflict with the postwar economic policies of the new Dutch government. The official position seemed to claim that any large-scale restoration of Jewish property would hinder postwar recovery. The new Prime Minister, Wim Schermerhorn, even went so far as to explain to Dutch Zionists that “they could not expect him, as a socialist, to help restore money to Jewish capitalists.”
• • •
On a typically cold and bleak December day in 1945, my father finally came home to Bosbeek. Unlike millions of other homes across Europe, the Bosbeek estate had escaped complete physical destruction. It had not been reduced to rubble by bombs or burned to the ground by incendiaries. The actual fighting had largely passed it by. Nevertheless, the home, the life that my father had once known there, had been destroyed by the war—completely, utterly, and forever.
The gardens, untended, had gone to thorn and thistle, the lawns to weeds. The ornamental ponds lay empty save for a few inches of murky rainwater. Many of the once-stately elms and oaks were now only ragged stumps, victims of widespread “wood rustling” for fuel during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, when thousands of Dutch civilians shivered and died of starvation. If any of the Scottish terriers that had once roamed the grounds had survived the early years of the occupation, they could not have survived the Hunger Winter, when stray dogs were widely hunted for food.
What still remained in the manor house after Fritz and Louise’s arrest had been shipped to Germany. The items that the Germans had not bothered to take were sent to Gustav Cramer, the collaborator art dealer in The Hague. Böhler would, of course, get his cut. Anything else remaining had been divided among the Dutch quislings who had assisted the Nazi looters. Westerbeek, the once-trusted employee, had been the main beneficiary.
In a house once filled with beautiful art, the only piece that remained, remarkably, was the De Wit plafond painting in the ceiling over the grand salon. To Bernard’s horror, Bacchus and Ceres in the Clouds, the spectacular giant painting, was now pockmarked with bullet holes—German bullet holes. My father assumed it must have been too difficult to remove, and the greedy Nazi dealers had apparently felt the same way.
I would discover, years later, that Westerbeek had actually been able to remove the plafond painting, which was in fact a giant canvas. Westerbeek, obviously with help, had gouged the nearly nineteen-by-twelve-foot canvas from its frame in the ceiling. Undeterred, he also pried the large De Wit trompe l’oeil grisaille out of the wall, over the salon doorway, where it had been since 1751. The scavengers then stashed the two precious artworks in the dust of the cellar, along with everything else they could not readily carry out. Westerbeek next offered the ceiling painting to Hermann Göring’s agent, Dr. Göpel, for fifty thousand Dutch guilders (or about $25,000 at the time). Before Westerbeek could complete the deal, however, the entire Bosbeek estate was commandeered by the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (a branch of the Nazi Party). Almost immediately, a senior official from the NSV noticed the missing De Wit ceiling painting, and Westerbeek was ordered to return that painting to its rightful place. But the mundane household furnishings—kitchen tables, pots and pans, everyday appliances, the bedding, and my grandparents’ remaining clothes—were all stripped as if by locusts.
Meanwhile, emptied of its treasures large and small, Bosbeek manor house had not remained unoccupied. As the war had neared its end, the house had been taken over by some German soldiers. The parquet floors had been scuffed and scarred by countless jackboots—the beautiful paneling and the great ceiling painting punctured with bullet holes. Even after the liberation in the spring of 1945, some German soldiers, now POWs, had been ordered by the Allies to stay behind and remove mines and tank traps that had been planted in and near the grounds. After the last Germans finally left that summer, the Dutch Ministry of Justice took over and turned Bosbeek into a reform school for the children of recently arrested Nazi collaborators. Of those, there was no shortage.
Some two hundred thousand Dutch men and women were rounded up in the reckoning that came with the peace, charged with varying degrees of collaboration with the Nazis. Dutch girls who had taken German boyfriends had their heads shaved; some of the more grievous offenders were hanged. However, most of the rest were given prison sentences or simply interned. In the meantime, their children, temporary orphans, were housed by the thousands in government buildings and empty estates, including over two hundred children who were crammed into makeshift barracks-style dormitories in the once grand suites of Bosbeek.
It was these children who stared suspiciously as my father approached over the trampled lawns, his dejected gaze fixed on his parents’ ransacked home. They were merely children, eight and ten or fourteen years old, and not responsible for the sins of their parents. Nevertheless, after being raised on Nazi propaganda, as their parents embraced the Nazi hatred, the seeds had already been planted in these children’s minds. When my father asked one of the boys if he knew who used to live here before the war, the boy shrugged and waved a dismissive hand: “Just some rich Jews.”
Just some rich Jews. It was not the last time my father would encounter that sort of justification for what had happened to his parents and countless others. As my father would soon discover, whether from horror or guilt or shame, the world seemed all too eager to forget about what the Nazis had done—not only the lives they had robbed, but the belongings they had stolen as well.
Back in Amsterdam, numb with cold and frozen with dread, Bernard found the offices of the Council for the Restitution of Legal Rights. After waiting in line for hours, he was finally ushered into a drab office where an even more drab official stated bluntly, “We need a death certificate.” Bernard pointed out, incredulously, that they did not give death certificates in the camps. The official continued indifferently, “It will take several years before the state can presume death occurred.” Before my father could assume control of what might be left of the family estate, he would have to prove that his parents were no longer alive.
Returning to the hotel, Bernard began calling everybody he thought could help. The Red Cross again seemed the most practical. They gave my father the address of a Theresienstadt survivor named Zdenek Lederer. Lederer apparently was in touch with a few other survivors now living back in Prague, and he was compiling their stories. (Ultimately he would publish the definitive Ghetto Theresienstadt, in 1952.) Bernard decided that the only way to cut through the Dutch red tape was to travel to Prague himself. There, he felt sure, he would find the grim evidence he needed.
As the final days of 1945 approached, government offices across an exhausted Europe began to close. Pa returned home to London to celebrate Nick’s first Christmas. It was a rather subdued affair. By New Year’s Eve, he was back on the ferry, this time to Ostend, then Brussels, and the overnight train to Prague. On the first day of 1946, Bernard found himself traveling, albeit reluctantly and with considerable anxiety, across Germany for the first time in eight years. As the dim light began to fade from his second-class compartment, he gloomily watched the devastation unfold. When the train pulled into the Cologne station, there seemed to be barely one other building standing, except for the famous Gothic cathedral. The great twin spires loomed eerily over an otherwise flattened city.
In Prague, a gaunt Lederer took Bernard to visit an even more emaciated Czech woman named Joan Dubova, who had narrowly avoided the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Reluctantly, she began to talk. Not only did she confirm Jo Spier’s account of what had happened to Fritz and Louise, she had actually witnessed my grandfather being beaten to death at the foot of the Kleine Festung. After some convincing, she agreed to retell her story before a notary on Vaklavska Street, in a section of Prague built in the fifteenth century, now known, rather oddly, as New Town (or Nové Meĕsto). On January 4, 1946, an affidavit was issued. This significant step, however, only heightened Bernard’s growing sense of gloom. Nevertheless he returned to Amsterdam more determined than ever, only to be informed by the Dutch authorities that they did not recognize foreign notaries. Undeterred, my father contacted the notary in Prague and asked him to take the affidavit to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Finally, three months later, on April 16, 1946, the Czechoslovak government issued an official death certificate for Fritz Gutmann.
In the interim, however, in true Kafkaesque style, the Dutch authorities had already appointed an accountant as official administrator of the Fritz Gutmann estate. This was the same accountant who had been administering the Gutmann Family Trust since the occupation, with disastrous results. Meanwhile, it would take another five months before my father could obtain a legal Dutch death certificate. As soon as he received this, he filed suit against the Dutch State to be recognized as his father’s legal heir. Unfortunately, it would then take more than another year before Bernard was officially declared, in October 1947, heir and administrator of the Fritz Gutmann estate.
My father might have complained, but only to my mother or his sister, Lili. In Holland, Bernard could count on Franz Koenigs’s daughters, Nela and her sisters, for some sympathy, but not many others. Along with the Proehls, the family of the late Franz Koenigs was all that was left of the entire social world the Gutmanns had known in the Netherlands.
In the meantime, my father had much to preoccupy himself with. Ever since that dismal day in December 1945 he could not get out of his head the haunting image of the ghostly white walls of his beloved Bosbeek. When Bernard had last seen the family home in 1938, it had been filled with color, with the wonderful artworks his father had so lovingly collected over the years—the two Degas, the Renoir, the Cranachs, the Memling, the Guardis and the Gainsborough, the Bosch and the Botticelli. When he returned to Bosbeek on that cold day in December, not one of them remained. The paintings, the furniture, the china, the silver, the carpets, the cars, even the dogs—everything was gone. Even the door to the safe room, which had once protected the Orpheus Clock and the other family treasures, had disappeared. Pa knew nothing of Haberstock and Böhler, of Mühlmann and Miedl, of the Führermuseum and Göring’s Carinhall. Bernard knew only that the Nazis had come and then they had gone, and with them the paintings and other artworks had vanished.
Amid the destruction left by World War II, mere possessions, even valuable paintings, meant relatively little. Millions were dead, including Bernard’s parents; millions more were displaced and scattered to the winds as refugees and stateless people, including many of his own family members. Europe lay in ruins, its cities damaged or destroyed, its communications and transportation networks in chaos, many of its people starving. In the midst of all that, a few pretty canvases were perhaps insignificant.
Yet, as the months passed and the terrible finality of his parents’ deaths sank in, for my father those missing artworks took on an importance beyond their artistic or material worth. They were the last link to the happy days of his youth, the sole remaining connection to the life he had once known, and they were his murdered parents’ last legacy. He understood that, given their value, it was highly unlikely the Nazis would have destroyed any of them. He knew that at least some of those stolen paintings had to be out there, somewhere.
The only clue Bernard had was a letter from Lili, who was still in Italy waiting for legal travel documents. Lili had relayed to her brother the contents of the note that Fritz had smuggled out to her, on Hotel Ritz of Paris stationery. In the note he stated clearly that he had managed to send several pieces from his collection to Paris in the care of Arthur Goldschmidt and the Paul Graupe gallery on the place Vendôme. So Bernard decided his quest would begin in Paris.
• • •
In those same years, as the ashes of the war were settling, the scale of the Holocaust was becoming apparent. Fritz and Louise were not the only members of the extended Gutmann–Von Landau family to perish under the Nazis. Other innocents from our decimated extended family included Alice Gutmann, Ludwig Bloch, Egon Bloch, Stephanie Heller, Arthur Misch, Bettie Meyer, Vally Manheimer, Fritz Wallach, Gertrud Huldschinsky, Emma von Landau, Maurice Poznanski, Curt Sobernheim, Ellen Citroen, Franz Ledermann, Ilse Ledermann, and the fifteen-year-old Susi Ledermann.
Thankfully, though, most of Bernard’s immediate family had survived, but were scattered across Europe and America. Uncle Max, remarkably, managed to hide in Rome until the liberation. Uncle Kurt had left Paris when the Germans occupied the city in 1940, fleeing south toward the Franco-Spanish border. There he was caught and imprisoned by the Vichy French authorities while trying to cross the Pyrenees. Somehow he escaped and returned to Paris, deciding it would be safer to hide in the big city rather than in the French countryside. He worked as a window cleaner, then as a cook, and successfully kept ahead of the Gestapo until liberation came. Kurt’s daughter, Ursula, meanwhile, had managed to make her way to New York.
During all this time, the two aristocratic aunts, Lili Orsini and Toinon von Essen, had remained comfortably in their villas in Italy—Lili in the Villa Principessa outside Lucca, and Toinon in the Villa Mercadente in Rome. Seemingly, neither had been bothered by any anti-Semitic restrictions. Toinon’s daughter Jacobea, who married Baron Sapuppo, had successfully brushed off any suggestion of Jewish heritage. On the other hand, Toinon’s older daughter, Marion, was not able to keep such a low profile. Married to the head of the German Rothschilds, Marion had to flee to Switzerland in 1938, along with her husband, Albert von Goldschmidt-Rothschild, and their four children (including the twins, Mathilde and Nadine). With great regret, Albert was forced to abandon the ancestral home of Grüneburg outside Frankfurt, along with literally a trainload of precious artworks. Not satisfied, the Germans relentlessly pressured the Swiss to cancel his visa. The day after Christmas in 1941, Albert took his own life by jumping from the window of his hotel, overlooking the beautiful lake at Lausanne.
In England, after Herbert’s premature death, Daisy and Marion Gutmann (first cousin of Marion von Goldschmidt-Rothschild) had waited out the war, until Luca’s eventual release from the British internment camp in Canada. Herbert’s second son, Fredy Gutmann, was another who successfully made his way to New York; there he changed his name to Fred Gann and joined the US army. His knowledge of German became of great use when he was promoted to lieutenant during the invasion of Germany.
Back in Italy, young Lili had remained hidden in the San Gimignano tower with her children until July 1944, when Free French forces had liberated the town. (Lili was stunned to find the French forces led by a glamorous woman lieutenant perched on top of a tank. She discovered it was the famous writer Ève Curie, daughter of Marie Curie.)
At the end of the war, Lili was officially a resident of a former enemy country. As a result, she could not return to the Netherlands until her Dutch citizenship was reinstated. In 1946, after eight years, Bernard and Lili were tearfully reunited in Amsterdam. It was a miracle that either of them was still alive. They clung to each other for a long time, and then they started talking. There was so much to tell.
Lili described dodging the Fascists and the Gestapo only to be nearly shot by ungrateful Communist partisans. She had been smuggling supplies to the Resistance, on a horse-drawn buggy, when the partisans accused her of withholding vital food.
Meanwhile, Bernard told of a near miss: while still recovering in the hospital, another bomb hit his local pub, the Red Lion, at the end of Charles Street, exactly opposite his house. Even in March, just before the end of the war, a V-2 flying rocket-bomb landed nearby in Hyde Park, killing several people.
The war stories were accompanied by a certain bravado. But when Bernard explained what had happened to Bosbeek, the gloom set in. The subject, inevitably, turned to Theresienstadt. Eventually Bernard and Lili just sat in silence together.
