The Orpheus Clock

by Simon Goodman

  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.

  Bernard and Dee, hopeful, around the time of D-Day, 1944.

  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.

  The plafond painting in the salon at Bosbeek, by Jacob de Wit (1751).

  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 i
n 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.