by Ida Cook
And so, at the very moment when I was making big money for the first time in my life, we were presented with this terrible need. It practically never happens that way. It was much the most romantic thing that ever happened to us. Usually one either has the money and doesn’t see the need, or one sees the need and has not the money. If we had always had the money we might not have thought we had anything to spare. But I still had never handled more than five pounds a week in my life, and suddenly my income was rising to five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand a year: big money then.
I was intoxicated by the sight. And—terrible, moving and overwhelming thought—I could save life with it. Even now, I can hardly think of it without tears.
Gone were the days of light-hearted pleasure trips, the days when our greatest anxiety was whether office leave and strained finances would permit our going to hear opera when and where we liked. From now until the day war broke out, we lived with an ever-deepening sense of responsibility toward alleviating the growing horror and misery, which we had, by a strange combination of circumstances, come to understand almost as though it were our own problem.
In order to place the picture in its right perspective, it might be well to give a résumé of historical, as distinct from personal, events.
Early in 1936, Hitler remilitarised the Rhine Valley, administering the first shock, which even the most casual observer in other countries could not entirely ignore. But, as always after these unwelcome sensations, the degree of shock lessened and explanations and justifications were found that quietened some anxieties. Hitler offered a twenty-five years’ peace pact—having torn up the previous one—and presently people resumed their normal lives. They bought hats, went to the films, took themselves off on foreign holidays. “Nine Days in the Rhineland—Ten Guineas” as announced by Thomas Cook. Yes, that is what it was then!
All that the ordinary man in the street thought about this was that “that man” was at it again and that Germany seemed likely to be a perpetual pain in the neck to those who wanted a quiet life. The Nuremberg Laws was a vague term to most people, very imperfectly understood—except for the fact that they were something Hitler had thought up against the Jews. And, if the Jews were being put in their place in Germany, some people thought it was not a bad thing.
Early in 1938, Austria was invaded and absorbed, willy-nilly, into the German Reich. That was so much more difficult to explain away than the remilitarisation of the Rhine, even if no one could quite agree about how much had been “willy” and how much “nilly.” The degree of shock and uneasiness this event occasioned was never entirely ignored again. But it must be remembered that there was no television in those days and, for good or ill, no way of forcing a picturized version of the whole thing right into one’s home.
In September, 1938, there flared up the menace to Czecho-Slovakia. We trembled on the brink of war, and for the first time, many people saw things for what they were. With the sacrifice of vital parts of Czecho-Slovakia, Hitler was bought off again, although anyone with the smallest pretension to intelligence knew by now that all that had been bought was time.
In November, 1938, the first great concerted drive against the Jews began. This was sparked off by an event in Paris: a young German Jew shot an official at the German embassy. It was said that his parents had been ill-treated by the Gestapo, that his mind became unhinged and that he had shot the first German official he saw. Another story, told to us in Germany, was that the whole thing was a put-up job to inflame feelings against the Jews. I doubt if the real truth will ever be known now. But, for the purposes of history, it hardly matters. True or false, this incident signalled the launching of the greatest pogroms in history. From that day, and for years to come, wave after wave of murder washed in a ghastly tide across Europe, until something like six million unfortunates had perished.
On the terrible ninth and tenth of November, 1938, throughout Germany and Austria and the borders of Czecho-Slovakia—now under German domination—the order went forth that every male Jew between the ages of eighteen and sixty was to be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. And with very few exceptions, this came to pass, in circumstances of the most horrible brutality.
After a while, a shocked world heard that some of them had been released. That was true. Certain age groups and certain people who had served in the First World War were released. What was not generally understood was that they were released on one condition: that they signed an undertaking to be out of the country within eight weeks. They might take with them something under a pound in actual cash and a varying proportion—according to the mood of the official who handled their case—of their goods.
Every one of the unfortunate souls signed. Not a quarter per cent had the slightest hope of ever going anywhere. There was nowhere for them in the whole wide world. Who could take them in, with a capital of sixteen shillings or so? What country had an economy that could stand that influx of hundreds of thousands of penniless people—some desirable and an asset to any country, others of very ordinary value in any community and of less than no value if torn from their natural moorings?
And so, from the centre of Europe began to pour hundreds of thousands of the most desperate letters that have ever been written in the history of the world. Every one of them represented someone’s last hope. Prompted by terror and despair, people would remember that Cousin Anna had emigrated to America fifteen years ago, and that, in her last letter written twelve years ago, she had said she had married well.
Then one must write to her—or to Uncle Ernst, or that friend who had been so kind on holiday in the Tyrol three years ago or the unknown relations of great-aunt Leni—anyone, who was fortunate enough to live in the Great Outside and who might understand and help.
I suppose a great many of those letters were never even answered. How could they be? How could one letter from an almost forgotten relative or one-time friend hope to convey the absolute necessity of assuming financial responsibility for anything from one individual to a whole family? How could any ordinary person, living in an ordinary country in peacetime in the twentieth century, understand that murder and terror were closely stalking someone they had known as a rather prosperous businessman in Hamburg, or as a faded aunt in Frankfurt, or as a rather pushy young cousin—not especially likeable, now that one came to think of it—in Munich? It just didn’t make sense. These things didn’t happen in the twentieth century. There was some hysterical exaggeration somewhere—the whole thing was a put-on. Or, if not, it was something too big to tackle.
To Louise and me, knowledge of the situation had come gradually but inexorably. I make no claim to clearer perceptions than other people. We just happened to be lucky enough to see the problem in terms we could understand. In terms of personal friends, in fact.
Terrified, agonized need can be ignored if it is attached only to a name on paper. Or, if not ignored, at least it can reasonably appear to be of no direct responsibility to oneself. Change that name into a photograph of a human creature, who stammers out a frantic story, weeps some difficult tears, asks for nothing but hopes for everything, and show me the ordinary person who can refuse to help.
We had bypassed the stages of the names on paper and even the photographs. We were faced by the people themselves.
Our visits to Germany and Austria began to mean cases, cases and yet more cases, where we knew we were the last—often the only—hope of people who were in deadly danger and hourly terror. And from what had been an amateur gesture of goodwill to friends of two of our operatic favourites, there began to grow a regular and serious pattern of work that absorbed every waking thought and sometimes even followed us into our sleep.
To make it even more harrowing, the whole thing was really a fight against suicide as well as murder. We had to give people enough hope to keep them from committing suicide and not so much hope that they committed suicide when these high hopes were suddenly dashed.
Sometimes we failed, of course. We would go back to Germany, with a case half completed, to find that someone’s nerves had given way and they had thrown themselves out of a train, or put their head in a gas oven or opened a vein. We cried, of course, and we started again with someone else. What else could we do?
Each country had by now settled down to something like a settled policy. In England, broadly speaking, the position was this:
A refugee child could be brought over, provided a British citizen would “adopt” the child until the age of eighteen. A woman could sometimes be brought over on a domestic permit, provided you could give evidence of a job for her and provided the job had been advertised but not filled by a Britisher.
I am not going to pretend there was not a good deal of wangling and extension of meaning given to the word “domestic.” Every woman anxious to escape promptly became a perfect domestic on paper, and many were the misfits and recriminations. But I too would have claimed, quite inaccurately, to be a perfect domestic in like circumstances. I hope I would have tried hard to live up to the description. The worthwhile ones did, of course. The others did not.
In the case of a man between eighteen and sixty, the position was much more complicated. Only those who had documentary proof that they were going on to another country eventually could hope to have the coveted British visa. In most cases, this proof consisted of papers to show that they were in the “queue” for emigration to the United States. And by the number in the queue, you could tell if he would have to wait six months, a year, two years or three years—in the case of some poor souls, even longer.
If only they could be sheltered from the ferocity of Nazi persecution while they waited for their turn, these people could glimpse a chance of life and hope far away in the distance. They could spend the waiting time in Britain provided—and here was the snag—that a British citizen would assume full financial responsibility for each case from the moment he landed in Britain until he reached the final country of his adoption. Only in a very few cases would he have a work permit.
A guarantor was required, and as may be imagined, few people could afford to make such a gesture or take on such a responsibility. With the best will in the world and the most sympathetic understanding of the situation, most people simply could not do it, even for a close relation or a good friend.
In the case of both men and women over sixty, the financial guarantee had to be, quite simply, for life.
By now, Louise and I were heart and soul in the problem and were beginning to find that many people, having heard part or all of what was happening, were very anxious to help to the limit of their capacity. They would say, “Well, I could give a shilling a week towards a fund.” Or, “I could manage a pound note at the moment, but I couldn’t possibly promise anything regularly.” Or, “I could put someone up for a month or two, but not indefinitely.”
All these offers were made with good heart, but were of little use to the refugee committees themselves, because they were so inundated with appeals that they had time to deal only with completed cases, where papers, guarantees and undertakings were all in order. Louise and I felt that we could do something about these smaller offers, since we were now going back and forth to Europe regularly and dealing with cases personally.
Having exhausted our own capacity for giving guarantees, we began to coordinate the smaller offers of money or hospitality around individual cases, until we had enough money or hospitality to “cover” a case. Then we would persuade some trusting friend or relative to sign the official guarantee form, on the understanding that the guarantee would never be called on because we already had the wherewithal to meet the needs of the case.
You never know what you can do until you refuse to take no for an answer. In this very amateur way, we did manage to rescue twenty-nine people and set them on new lives. The same mentality that had made us reckon the expenses of our first American adventure to the final penny now enabled us to think in terms of adding shilling to shilling, week to week, and effort to effort. The same naïve technique by which we had got ourselves to the States for our pleasure was used when we stumbled into Europe and began to save lives.
Louise, as her part of the work, began to learn German so that she could interview in German if necessary. I financed the work from the romantic novels—and very strange it was, switching from romantic fiction to tragic fact. I also did most of the correspondence—except when it needed to be done in German. And every few months, sometimes oftener if the work demanded it, we went to Europe to attend to our cases personally.
These journeys became more and more frequent and were often of suspiciously short duration. Louise could, fortunately, divide up her annual holiday allowance pretty much as she liked, and I, of course, could give myself time off from my writing when it was necessary. Sometimes our excursions occupied no more than a weekend.
Louise would take Saturday morning off—no five-day week in those days, and Saturday morning counted as a whole day’s leave. She would leave the office on Friday evening and we would dash to Croydon to catch the last airplane to Cologne. We would be in Cologne by nine-thirty in the evening, in time to catch the night train to Munich. Either going or coming, we would probably stop off at Frankfurt where most of our cases were. If we went straight through, we would be in Munich in time for breakfast on Saturday morning.
Our return journey would be made through Holland on Sunday; it was better to go in by one frontier and out by another, especially if we were smuggling out jewellery, which was usually the case. We would cross from Holland by the night boat on Sunday, arriving at Harwich early on Monday morning, then on to London by train, and Louise would walk into the office just in time. But somewhere en route to Frankfurt, Munich or Cologne, we would have attended to one or more of our cases.
After a while, we began to be known at Cologne airport, and some awkward and unfriendly questions were asked. At this point, our operatic interests came to our rescue once more.
By now Clemens Krauss was head of the Munich Opera House, and he and Ursuleac, having started us on our refugee work, took a considerable personal interest in what we were doing, though of course, we had to keep this entirely to ourselves. It was he who hit on an admirable way of cloaking our activities. Before we left Germany each time, we would tell him which dates we needed to have “covered” next time. Often, it was a question of only one or two days in a couple of months’ time. He would then tell us what he would put on at the Opera House that night—occasionally we were even allowed to choose our own opera—and he would give us full details of the cast, etcetera. Then off we would go to England.
When we returned to Germany on the appointed date, we were simply operatic enthusiasts, coming for a special performance—or performances—about which we knew all the details. We were, of course, sufficiently opera fans to play the role completely. And, though there were sometimes a few smiles for the opera-mad English couple, we never again had trouble about the frequency and shortness of our visits.
Krauss never let us down once, and we always got our opera performances, but we also dealt with our case or cases under cover of our hobby. Sometimes Krauss and Ursuleac would be in Berlin and then we dealt with Berlin cases. And each year when the summer opera festival came on in Munich, we used to bring out from England a party of people who wanted to go abroad, but did not want the bother of organizing the trip.
I used to constitute myself “manager,” even to the point of dealing with all the financial arrangements. In this way, I could arrange to have enough Reiseschecks in each member’s name to avert any questions, but in actual fact, few of these “travellers checks” were ever cashed. I paid the party’s expenses from money given to me by people who hoped to escape to England one day. Then, when we returned home, we credited these people with the equivalent in English money, thus transferring some of their capital, without any cash ever passing the frontier. That established something f
or them to live on when we hauled them out, by way of a guarantee.
If we were not exactly breaking the law, I suppose one might say that we were bending it rather sharply. Some of our party knew what we were doing. Others probably did not—and never will, unless they read this.
Crazy days! Sometimes we thought they would go on forever. Sometimes we deliberately had to remind ourselves and each other that there was another world to which we would be able to return one day. Gradually, we came to regard those last bright days of what we called “the Rosa Ponselle years” at Covent Garden as the norm, to which one might possibly return. There was a play running in London about that time called There’s Always Juliet. And, in the absurd way that one does these things, we coined the phrase, “There’s always Rosa!”
In how many hotel bedrooms, in how many German towns, have Louise and I said those words to each other? Meaning that somewhere beyond the fogs of horror and misery in which we moved were the lovely bright things that we had once taken for granted. One day, we told ourselves, we would rediscover them. One day, we would even hear Rosa sing again, and perhaps recapture something of the carefree lightness of heart that had once been ours.
Sometimes, we thought we could not bear to go back yet again into that hateful, diseased German atmosphere. Sometimes we even put into words to each other: “This will have to be the last time.” But it never was, of course, until war made it so.
And for that extra bit of courage and determination that took us back time after time, Clemens Krauss and his wife Viorica Ursuleac must take full credit. It was they who sugared that horrible pill—with both their matchless performances and their dear friendship and support.
