“I hope he doesn’t hurt his boyfriend, he only looked about my age,”
“Yes, I agree. I don’t think he will hurt him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the boys he picks up are the only people he treats like human beings. Yet, these are the ones he keeps hidden from the rest of his life,” Gunari started the car and pulled away from the kerb on the journey back to the camp.
“Funny world we live in,” I say. A man can be taken advantage of simply by threatening to expose his relationship with another man. If the man’s friends and the voters didn’t mind that he was in love with a man what would we have done then? I am about to ask Gunari when he cuts in:
“Oh, your Christmas gift is in the glove compartment,”
“It’s a bit early, isn't it? Christmas isn’t for another few weeks,” I said in an admonishing tone while simultaneously hunting around the glove box like a maniac, “Where is it?”
“It’s the envelope there,” Gunari pointed vaguely in the direction I was already looking in. I spotted a white envelope amongst the debris and saw it had my name neatly written on it by Janko. I exclaimed an “Ooh!” and opened it, pulling out a ticket for the upcoming Rocky IV film!
“Wow Gunari, did you know that it’s already been released in America? Here in Europe, we have to wait until January. He’s fighting some big Soviet guy called Ivan Drago,”
“Oh yes? I bet he’s no Rukeli Trollmann,” Gunari said.
“Who?” I replied blankly, “Is he in the film?”
“No, he was a great German boxer in the Twenties and Thirties of Sinti descent. He fought for the German title against Adolf Witt in 1933, the Nazi authorities gave it to Witt at first until there was an outcry as he had been outboxed by Rukeli. Janko claimed to have seen the fight when he was a boy but I think the chances of that are less than me living on the moon next year,”
“What happened then?”
“The officials stripped him of his title then made him fight someone else and pressured him to lose. By the time the Second World War began he had been sterilised for being of Sinti descent and packed off to the Eastern Front. Ultimately he ended up murdered in a concentration camp by a criminal who he had beaten in a boxing fight.”
“That’s an incredible story,” I said.
“He was only thirty-six when he died, what a life he had. He was my hero growing up even though I never saw him fight. Even in boxing, gypsy fighters have to do twice as much work to earn a win,”
We returned that night to the camp to drop off the photos and explain what had happened. Following that, we returned to Janko at the cottage. In the subsequent three weeks, images from the trip to Lyon have been at the forefront of my thoughts.
The rabid response of the crowd to Ginesty’s speech scared me as much as the sight of young Roma kids playing amidst burning motorhomes sickened me. For some reason the image that stuck in my mind was Ginesty’s face as the world he knew crumbled in an instant. All it takes is one moment and the fragility of the life you construct is exposed as a house of cards. It took us one evening and some commando photography to end a politician’s career.
The Death of Martin Bormann
Wednesday, 25 December 1985
“You’ll never guess who lived here before me Ana?” Janko is sat in his favourite chair, in the midst of lighting one of his favourite French cigarettes, a Gauloise. He claims they have the flavour of a Parisian street cafe in late May. I am sat in front of the roaring fire eating my Christmas Toblerone. It’s so hot sat here I am sure my whole body is melting. It feels tremendous.
“No, Janko,” I say, humouring him, “Someone famous, I bet?” Janko cackles and takes a big drag on his cigarette. He exhales and smokes rises around him reminding me of a elderly Native American chief regaling the younger Indians with some buffalo-related tales.
“You could say that,” He sits there in the chair, a pensive look crosses his face and he continues to smoke. Janko and his dramatic pauses may be the death of me.
“Are you going to tell me before the New Year? Who was it?”
“Have you heard of Martin Bormann?” Gunari intercedes from his seat at the kitchen table.
“The Nazi? Yeah I’ve heard of him, why would he live in Savoy? Unless it was before the war?”
“No, it wasn’t before the war,” Janko has finally come back to life, “It was after the war, not too long after. Ha, he thought he had escaped justice,”
A harsh look appears across Janko’s face, the sudden change from his kindly face is shocking. Janko stubs out his cigarette, lights another immediately which is against his normal habit and re-focuses back on me.
“Bormann was one of the worst of the Nazi leadership, and let’s be fair, that says a lot about your character doesn’t it? He was an avid hater of pretty much everyone who wasn’t Martin Bormann. Not only the Roma or Jews, but Catholics, Slavs, you name it - he instigated a policy of discrimination against them. From the beginnings of the Nazi party he was there, and not only in a political role. He was directly implicated in some pretty unsavoury incidents including slicing the throat of a suspected informant.”
“How did you end up buying a house off him?” I say, I hear Gunari snort a rare laugh in the background.
“What? Are you soft between the ears?” Janko says, chuckling out loud, “I think if he knew that I was living here now he wouldn’t be very pleased.
“He was there until the bitter end when Hitler and his wife killed themselves in his bunker in Berlin. Bormann escaped with some other high-ranking Nazis allegedly holding Hitler’s last will and testament. Despite the Red Army bombarding them they somehow managed to cross the Spree and escape.
“A very good source informed me that an infantryman who was there accompanying them said that this group of Nazis all split up and agreed to meet in Salzburg at an agreed location. Bormann, against all odds, made it out of Germany alive.
“Oh, Germany was imploding. It was stricken, a violent mess. After the war it was…” Janko’s voice trailed off, his sad eyes moistening as he looked out upon the ice-blue mountains beyond the lake. It was decades ago and I could see it was a deep struggle for Janko to tell me what happened. He brought his eyes back to me and smiled kindly, wiping a tear away from his eye. He continued:
“You wouldn’t believe that people could actually live in such a devastated, benighted place. Whole districts that were there when I was a boy had simply vanished. Vanished. I lived in Munich as a teenager and it was a wonderful city full of centuries of history. But it was now a shell of a city.
“Bricks, rocks and bombed out tanks were scattered all over the place. People simply stood around in the streets, their homes had probably been destroyed. Barefoot children were wandering aimlessly around. Their mothers most likely killed in the Allied bombing or raped by the Red Army and their fathers killed on the Eastern Front. It was now a nation of zombies. They didn’t think it was real, that such a difference in five years could be possible.
“The funny thing was that I was numb to the sheer amount of death and bodies that I had seen over the course of the conflict. But I was much more affected by the destroyed buildings. The brilliance of humanity that could craft such a beautiful city full of stunning churches and palaces yet could also generate hatred and violence that facilitated its destruction. The revulsion I felt was similar to when I travelled to Frankfurt to rescue a friend a few years earlier and I saw the conditions our people were being forced to live in.
“During the war, I had been recruited by a fellow called Věštec, from the Czech part of Austro-Hungary. His name meant “Oracle” and he had actually named himself this. He genuinely thought he was blessed with supernatural mental powers. A strange man, as Gunari would also attest, but also one of the bravest men I have ever encountered.
“Luckily for me, my German accent turned out to be a tremendous asset,” Janko chuckles to himself at this, “I sounded more Bavarian than most of the SS and with my fair hair and strong build I could pass
as a native German. Yes, I possessed thick straw-blond hair in those days which may surprise you, Ana.
“At the end of the war, we heard about an American army captain, William Marek who had Roma roots. His father was of Moravian Protestant stock and his mother was a Roma from what is now Poland. It was a risk to speak to him but we knew he was involved in army intelligence. Věštec set up a meeting between us.
“You have probably heard of Odessa, the city in the Soviet Union, but it was also the name of an organisation that helped Nazis evade justice and flee to South America where they would be protected by corrupt regimes.
“Well, Bill Marek had an idea. He had a couple of contacts who worked in art dealerships across the Sprachraum, the German-speaking parts of the world: Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg. The escaping Nazis were financing their global jaunts by desperately selling the artwork they had looted off the Jews across Europe. It wasn’t altruism and ideology that enabled their departures but Rubens and Michelangelo.
“One of the dealers in Salzburg was Jewish. He had hidden his identity and was willingly fencing art, it was his guilt that prompted him to speak to the Americans. Luckily, Bill knew the dealer and a plan began to take root.
“I had been in and out of Germany all the way throughout the war. Věštec, me and our other team member, an old chap called Mircea would travel around the country and the sights we saw meant not only did we understand the depravity of the Nazis. But it meant we also knew we could convince others to believe that we were Nazis too. I was selected to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
“I was planted to work with the art dealer. Isaaksen was his real name but he changed it to Smith before the start of the war. He sold off the family gallery in Berlin and opened an antique and art shop called ‘Cooper and Smith’s Fineries’ in Salzburg and he passed himself off as a South African art dealer.
“During the war Nazis, including some very high ranking ones, would come to his shop for advice regarding artwork that they had looted, mainly off the Jews. He would advise on the value and history of each piece and secretly would attempt to discover the provenance of them too. He would build rapport with the Nazis and try to find out where it had been ‘liberated’ from,”
“That could have caused him a lot of trouble,” I say, enraptured by the tale.
“Oh yes, definitely. But Smith, as I had to call him, was very charismatic. He charmed everybody, they wouldn’t have guessed he had Jewish blood. He wasn’t tall but had broad shoulders and blonde hair, we could have been brothers. The perfect Aryan specimens, he called us: the gypsy and the Jew. He was an excellent reader of people and he knew exactly how to deal with each customer. He disarmed them with charm.
“And all the while he was teaching me about art while I worked as his assistant. I would spend my days with him at museums and galleries in Salzburg, Munich, Vienna, Prague. You name the place and we spent time there. He would visit local Nazi leaders and rich businessmen and he would facilitate sales of the artwork.
“I was soon picking up a massive amount of knowledge, both of art and of the Nazis and their industrialist enablers. None of them realised that Smith was making an incredibly detailed log of the artwork and the connections related to them. It was funny, Smith frequently predicted the Nazi regime wouldn’t last five years. That was in nineteen forty-one when he first said it.
“Nowadays, the narrative is crystal clear with the benefit of hindsight. But you don’t understand fear until you’ve lived under the Nazis. Every day I was scared I would be exposed as a Roma. Smith never showed fear but I know he was driving himself insane with dread. Some nights we would drink a bottle of Scotch whiskey and talk about life like it was our last night on earth. He was only about forty at the time but he seemed so knowledgeable about the world.
“The scale of the Nazi advance was incredible. Smith was, in a manner of speaking, quite admirable of their achievement. He said if he didn’t own the shop he would have thought that they were an unstoppable force. But the avarice and self-serving nature of the Nazis he had been dealing with since he moved to Salzburg convinced him that the moment they suffered a setback they would collapse.
“We were hearing updates from officers who had been on the Eastern Front and this only reinforced his view that the Nazi state was on the verge of collapse. We were hearing the truth about what was unfolding in forty-two in Stalingrad from the officers and comparing it to the propaganda they were pumping out in the Reich. It was bullshit and the high-ranking Nazis knew.
“By forty-four, we had gleaned snippets of information about an organisation called Odessa. Smith was now a regular at parties hosted by the top Austrian Nazis. After the Sicily landings, Italian fascists began to depart for South America, especially Argentina. Many of the Italians already had family there. Apparently, some of the Italians began helping some German friends to flee also.
“With the connections made with sympathisers in South America, the Nazis began to forge a partnership where they would be able to move to the Americas. It was small scale at first with low ranking officers fleeing but after the fall of Mussolini, some of the famous names you may recognise from your history books started to make discreet inquiries. And how did they pay for their escape?”
“I don’t know, the looted paintings?” I reply.
“Exactly, princess. And it turned out that I was at the beating heart of the operation.”
Janko lights yet another Gauloise and his eyes betray a reflective gaze.
“A German called Reutlinger was behind the ratlines out of Europe. To this day, I barely know anything about him despite my research. The first time I saw him was in forty-four and he was dressed in the uniform of a Sturmbannführer. The more I look back, the more I am convinced he was not SS,”
“What do you think he was?” I ask.
“Gestapo perhaps, maybe something else entirely. The Nazis thrived on secrets and secret organisations, sometimes it felt like a game. Almost as if they enjoyed the surreptitious nature of their work with no regard to the damage they caused. And if they lost the game, rather than shake your hand - they would simply kill you.”
“One day in April forty-five Reutlinger arrived in the shop in Salzburg. For the first time, he looked panicked. He had received instructions to sell some paintings as quickly as possible as a few Nazis were looking to escape. He told us this with no hint of subtlety or precaution. He straight out supplied us a few names of the Nazis involved and the artworks they were prepared to sell. Smith would make copious notes about the artworks which I still have to this day. This was only weeks before everything collapsed and the Germans lost the war.
“Bormann was selling a painting that was locked up in a bank in Luxembourg. Vincent van Gogh’s now legendary Painter on the Road to Tarascon. Other Nazis possessed some truly priceless artwork. We discussed a plan and we realised that to keep our cover we would only be able to take out one Nazi. Bormann was the biggest bastard on the list so he was our pick.
“Bormann was planning on leaving his wife and moving to Argentina. The plan was for Reutlinger to take him from a safe house somewhere in Austria to a cottage the Nazi Party had obtained in Savoy thanks to the pliant Vichy regime. Our humble abode here, need I say any more? We arranged to bring the money over to Savoy. Smith would obtain the painting in Luxembourg and telephone the cottage to inform us we had it in our possession.
“The drive to the cottage was probably the most nervous I have ever been in my life. Most of our missions prior to this during the war were sabotages. We would blow up bridges and telephone exchanges. The only time violence was used was when we would threaten people to provide information. And most of that threat was implied. A couple of times on the drive I had to tell Věštec to stop the car so I could be sick. I tried to pretend it was carsickness.
“We wound our way through the mountain roads and I couldn’t shake the queasy feeling in my stomach. Before that point I embraced danger, you don’t engage in as many fights as I d
id in my life without a certain sense of recklessness. But this time, all I could think was this was my end and I wasn’t ready to die. I knew Reutlinger was a dangerous man, and now he was on the run and potentially erratic.
“There was still light snow flurries despite it being the middle of spring. Věštec kept telling me that he had seen what was going to happen, he knew both men would die in a few hours. I didn’t respond, I was sure two men would die but I was ninety-nine percent sure it would be the two of us being buried in shallow graves on a French hillside.
“Věštec drove us up near to the cottage, he got out and went off to prepare his part of the job. I moved to the driver's seat and guided the car up to the cottage. The sun was setting over the cottage and the mountains were tinted a beautiful shade of red. At least if I was going to die it would be in the nearest thing to paradise I had laid eyes on.
“I parked up and fought against a panic attack. I couldn’t bring my hands off the steering wheel. I spent too long in the car, a suspiciously long time before I could gain the confidence to get out and meet Bormann and Reutlinger.
“I spent about an hour in their company, it was the longest hour imaginable. I attempted a couple of conversations but they were both so edgy I didn’t want to push them too far and I was sure that every time I spoke my voice cracked. Eventually, the telephone rang, I almost ran to pick it up, I answered and Smith confirmed he had the painting.
“‘Good luck, my friend,’ Smith said to me and I hung up the line. I told Bormann and Reutlinger that we had the painting in our possession. I handed over twenty thousand Swiss Francs to the two Nazis. I was convinced Reutlinger would shoot me in the head at this point but he didn’t. He told me where to leave the keys to the cottage and then they both left. Perhaps I didn’t factor in that these two men were even more terrified than I was, they wanted to abscond from the cottage more than I did.
The Wind and the Rain Page 6
