Belvès, 1970s: my memories of Grete and Hélène
Throughout my childhood, each summer, we would make the long car journey from Surrey to Belvès in the Dordogne, to visit ‘Granny Grete’.
White-haired, gold-toothed, upright, smoking cigarettes in a holder, Grete seemed to belong to a distant world, a mysterious past. She was surrounded–in what was then, long before the middle-class English invasion of the area, a real backwater in the middle of rural France–by remnants of a different life. The ‘menagerie’ of Venetian glass; the Austrian playing cards, which would be laid out on the vine-shaded patio table in a 104-card game of patience; items of jewellery, pearls and diamond brooches–a range of objects and accoutrements that completed the picture of a grand lady belonging in some salon of a great city. Occasional remarks would hint at that past: Mahler might be mentioned, or Bruno Walter–or the cousin who had emigrated to the States and ran the Metropolitan Opera. There were curious old photographs and artefacts dating from the sojourn in the Dutch East Indies, with her first husband, and–though I do not remember Moriz ever being mentioned–a writing desk, some old pens, some traces of writerly presence.
With my grandmother, Grete, 1960s.
And then there was Hélène. By the time of my earliest memories of our visits, she and Grete had become inseparable; and we understood that she was in a way as much a part of the family as our grandmother. We would visit Hélène, and until his death her husband Gabriel, in their flat above their hardware shop, or she would come to the ‘maisonette’–often bringing pastries–every day. We would have many of our meals together. Occasionally, we also met Jacquot, on a visit from Paris. My main memory is of him performing a knife-swallowing trick for the amusement of us children.
Gradually, in later years, we children began to understand the extraordinary story that lay behind the friendship with Hélène. It was, in a sense, our family legend–oft repeated by my father, albeit only in dim outline. The key points of that outline–points which, especially in later life, my father could not get past without a crack in the voice–were the actions of the two women: how Hélène had ‘risked the life of her only son’ to save them; how Veili (Sláva) had been prepared to join them in a concentration camp, though she was not Jewish.
The story of the book: the survival of ‘A Survivor’
By my late teens I had become increasingly fascinated by my family past–the pre-war Viennese culture, the estate in Bohemia, the dramatic and terrible stories of tragedy or of escape. It was, I think, around 1980, that my father came out with what was, to him, a casual revelation: ‘My stepfather,’ he said, ‘wrote some account of his experiences during the War, but I found it so full of self-pity that I threw it away.’
And it seems that he genuinely had done that. My disappointment, even anger, at such an action–its failure to understand my fascination with the family history–faded to resignation. There was nothing to be done: that manuscript, whatever exactly it had been, was long gone.
Then, in 2005, my father moved house, and my brother and I were faced with the task of clearing out the attic. Amid the accumulated stuff of forty-three years of family life–books, toys, garden furniture–there were a number of suitcases that must have been deposited there at some point by Grete: suitcases predominantly full of Czech linen, silver or other family possessions. Some of the suitcases also contained papers, for example, folders with copies of Moriz’s newspaper articles, reviews of his books, and so on. And there, suddenly, amid the lace tablecloths and monogrammed dressing gowns, it was. A sheaf of fragile papers, typed in German: ‘Ein Ueberlebender’ (A Survivor) by Moriz Scheyer. It was the long-lost manuscript–the carbon copy of the destroyed original.
The fact that the story of the above pages had lain hidden, above us, for all those years–literally hanging over us–was an extraordinary one. More troubling, though, was the fact that my father had apparently destroyed it.
My father, Konrad Singer, shortly after the War.
I tried, subsequently, to make sense of my father’s reaction. The charge of ‘self-pity’ is one I remember clearly, from that first revelation of the book’s existence (and of its destruction). It is perhaps significant that in later conversations–and he had not reread the manuscript in between–he did not repeat that charge, but focused rather on the book’s strident ‘anti-German’ sentiment. Perhaps, with increasing years, even my father had come to feel that the judgement of ‘self-pity’ was a harsh one to make in relation to such an account.
There was a conflict in experience and attitude–a conflict that went far beyond the content of the actual book, although certainly an impatience with his stepfather’s emotionalism, an aesthetic abreaction to its tone, formed part of his negative attitude to it. One must, I think, consider that broader conflict in experience and attitude. My father, too, was uprooted from his family home–but at the age of twenty, to a country which did not become occupied, and with the opportunity to continue his career from more or less the point at which it had been interrupted. He did not personally witness any horrors, let alone live in daily fear of arrest or deportation.
One might, for sure, see a lack of imagination, or empathy, in his reaction to Moriz’s account as either ‘self-pitying’ or ‘anti-German’. When I asked him, in an interview after the manuscript’s discovery, when it was that he first realised what his parents had gone through, he responded: ‘Well, what they had to go through was really nothing compared with what other people had to go through.’ When probed as to what it was that he objected to so strongly in the book, he talked of the incident Moriz recounts of the young German soldiers delighting in peeing through the fence in the direction of the Jewish prisoners. Two things were particularly objectionable here: his dwelling on something–the action of some stupid boys–that he should have been able to ‘rise above’; and his dwelling on things likely to spread anti-German feeling, to give a blanket condemnation of all Germans as evil. He associated Moriz’s focus on this incident with his habitual tendency to talk in sweeping, condemnatory terms of the actions and character of ‘the Boche’.
My father’s attitude seems harsh, unrealistic, unsympathetic. But it was in some ways, I think, not uncharacteristic of the younger generation in 1945. They wanted to look forward, not backwards; the attitude–in my father’s case, as in others–was one of rationalist idealism. They would build a new world in which the irrationalities of religion, nationalism and racialism that had shattered Europe–and of course, destruction and bereavement were everywhere to be seen: they had not affected only Jewish communities–would cease to be relevant. They did not want to dwell on those irrationalities. There is, in this, too, perhaps, some of the typical ‘second generation’ attitude to the survivors’ experience. It was, to put it simply, a long time before people wanted to know.
It is interesting to set alongside that attitude Moriz Scheyer’s own pessimism about the audience for his book: that no one would ever be interested in ‘what had happened to Jews’. The perception might seem an extraordinary one today, after the publication of so many survivors’ accounts and Holocaust histories, let alone of related films and television documentaries, as well as the very high consciousness of these events in school education. Yet this would all happen much later. It is one of the most valuable, near unique, features of Scheyer’s account that it was written at the time, in the heat of events. By the same token, that account–completed before the beginning of the Nuremberg trials and decades before the publication of most survivors’ accounts–is evidence of a moment in history where it was quite plausible to believe that anti-Semitic atrocities–especially those of the National Socialists–would never be widely studied, or taken as seriously as their other crimes.
And the generational conflict, or conflict of attitudes, took a more concrete form. too. My father was involved actively in certain projects or re-education–in particular, giving lectures to Germans in British prisoner of war camps, and volunteering in emergency re
lief work in destroyed post-war Germany. The former project, presumably part of the post-war programme designed to prepare prisoners for life in de-Nazified Germany, and which my father himself described as ‘preaching the doctrine of reason’, was something that Moriz disliked and disapproved of. There was, to him, no point in trying to reason with these people.
Memories… and memories
Working on this book has emphasised fragility of memory, in a number of ways.
As already mentioned, I had interviewed my father about his early memories before the manuscript came to light, and then carried out some further interviews after that discovery. By the time of these further interviews, not only his short-term memory but his long-term memory, too, had started to become less secure: increasingly, I would draw a blank in asking for further information about this or that individual; I would notice, too, that an identical form of words would be used to describe two completely different persons or events, so that it was impossible to tell to whom it originally belonged; perhaps most worryingly, I realised that a tentative suggestion made by me in a question–‘Was it perhaps person X who did that?’–would be fed back to me a few minutes later in the conversation, as a certainty: ‘Of course, it was person X who did that.’
The document, dated 25th June 1941, certifying Moriz Scheyer’s liberation from imprisonment at the concentration camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. The reason for his release is given as ‘over the age of 55’.
I was faced with a striking contrast in forms of memory. On the one hand, I had the written account, the last letter typed in 1945, unchanging, in no way vulnerable to false memories or later confusions or suggestions, but unable to respond to my questions. On the other, I had my father’s living memories–theoretically an infinite resource, but fragile, subject to confusion and increasingly suggestible.
One hopes, in such a project as this, that one is rescuing something from oblivion, preserving for future generations something that came so close to being destroyed forever. Yet working on such a book brings home how fragile and tenuous the process of preserving past memories is–and how arbitrary and selective the ‘history’ that is in the end preserved.
It has been fascinating to delve into the past, to discover some hidden facts and recover long-forgotten personal histories. But the process has made me more intensely conscious than ever of the transience, the short lifetime of human memories. Without some written record, the actions and characters of individuals–individuals as intensely important to those around them as a Gabriel or Hélène Rispal–are largely, if not entirely, forgotten within a generation or two, at most three.
But even when there is some written record, some trace which invites one to want to know more, in the overwhelming number of cases it is just that: a trace. How soon all but a very few individuals disappear even beyond the reach of research and the trawling of archives–to the point where it is impossible to recover more than at best dates and places of birth and death, impossible to recover something of their personality or actions. I went in search of oral accounts to supplement the written document, and delved in libraries and archives to clarify or expand on what people had told me… but so often the oral account was hazy, and the relevant written account impossible to find. Before long there would be a tantalising impasse, a dead end beyond which I could not proceed.
Of course, it cannot surprise us that many of the characters in this drama–the inmates at Beaune, many of the people met at Belvès, even the Koflers–have vanished beyond the point where one might hope to add anything to the brief information contained in Scheyer’s pages. It is perhaps more surprising–again something that emerges from Scheyer’s writing–to realise how extraordinarily transient are artistic reputations. The name of Scheyer himself, a substantial figure in Viennese literary life in the 1930s, hardly appears even in specialist accounts of the literature and intellectual life of that period. And the reversal of fortunes is even more striking in the case of some of the much more famous individuals of whom he talks. Stefan Zweig, it is true, has undergone a recent revival; but the name of Romain Rolland, for example, an absolute giant of the political-intellectual culture of the inter-war years, hugely influential through his pacifism and his promulgation of the ideas of Tolstoy and Gandhi, and a virtual god to many (not just to Zweig and Scheyer), is now scarcely known; still less so a whole series of names of (then) major French literary figures, mentioned throughout the book.
Another very striking thing I discovered in the research on this book was that, even in the case of the persons in this story who do leave some historical record, that historical record does not contain the events of this story itself. Jacques Rispal, for example, is known, and sometimes locally celebrated, for his theatrical career and even for his Resistance activity; but his role in saving the lives of three–maybe many more–refugees is not recorded, even by Georges Rebière, who was his childhood friend and wrote a book about the period. Marian Dunlop–my father’s and uncle’s benefactor in enabling them to enter Great Britain–was a much loved and respected individual, who founded a school of Christian meditation which had a considerable following. There exists a biography, but it shows no awareness of her activity in enabling Jewish refugees to come to England. The youthful role of the distinguished economist Sir Alec Cairncross in raising the funds to enable refugee students to continue their lives in Glasgow was something of which even his immediate family were unaware.21
They are acts worth remembering.
Labarde today
At the Convent of Labarde, today, there is no memory that three refugees were sheltered there by the nuns during the darkest days of the Nazi Occupation. The convent is as Moriz Scheyer describes: remote from the bustle of normal life, secluded, difficult to find. One might be walking back into the pages of his narrative: more than sixty years on, the place is still, as he depicts it, a haven–a home for sufferers from mental disabilities. Visiting in 2009, we meet a few of them taking the air, walking with a relative or helper in their calm detachment. But there is no memory here, either personal or institutional, of the individuals or events related in Scheyer’s narrative. The story has not been passed down; no record has been kept. The ‘convent’, in fact, was long since deconsecrated and the internal architecture reorganised. Precise locations are impossible to find; even the extraordinary hiding place behind the chapel, related so vividly by Moriz, can only be reconstructed with a deal of guesswork and imagination.
The back building at Labarde, where Moriz, Grete and Sláva were given asylum.
Peering into the woods and fields of the Dordogne stretching away below, one wonders how many other extraordinary tales–tales of terror and of ordinary people’s heroism–remain forever hidden and forgotten in that huge landscape. The chance discovery of a typescript like this one does not tell all; in a way it raises more questions and makes one want to know so much more. But it does open up a vista, a world of experience which would otherwise be closed.
Moriz Scheyer: writer
Moriz Scheyer is a forgotten name of pre-war Viennese culture. However, he belonged to an important literary and cultural milieu, in which he played a significant role, with an active career as a critic, essayist and travel writer.
Early life and literary career
Moriz Scheyer was born in Focşani in Romania on 27th December 1886, the son of a businessman. But by the time of his secondary education the family had moved to Vienna, where they lived in Hietzing, a pleasant suburb to the south-west of the city. At school, he recalled, he was a ‘reasonable classicist’, able to feed answers in Latin and Greek exams to his friend, who would perform the same office for him in mathematics. He studied law at the University of Vienna, graduating in 1911; and started work on the staff of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt in 1914. This was one of Vienna’s two ‘quality’ daily newspapers, with a high reputation in the arts.
A lover of French culture and literature, Scheyer lived in Paris in the early 1920s, working as a cultural foreign corr
espondent for the paper–a role he continued on a more short-term basis, for a month a year, after his return to Vienna in 1924. He also spent some time as a correspondent in Switzerland.
In fact, he was quite a traveller; and this played a major part in his early literary activity. In 1918–19 he made a sea voyage via Egypt to South America–a voyage involving weeks on a cruise ship, and encounters with a number of then exotic locations, as well as exotic individuals. The experience inspired a number of writings, which are collected in his first three published books: Europeans and Exotics (Europäer und Exoten, 1919), Tralosmontes (1921) and Cry from the Tropical Night (Schrei aus der Tropennacht, 1926).
The young Moriz Scheyer.
The books consist of vignettes, vivid depictions of unusual places, events and, in particular, characters. For example, we meet Saadi ibn Tarbush, a young Egyptian boy who acted as Scheyer’s guide in Cairo, and to whom the glimpse given by Scheyer of the glamour of the European’s life turns out corrupting and fatal. Then there is Gly Cangalho, a morphine-addicted ‘Creole’ character who spends all her time travelling on cruises, and is known to all captains. Gly is a recurrent, apparently semi-fictionalised character in these early books, and seems to be the focus of some obsession on Scheyer’s part. Then, there are the parodic Englishmen–themselves almost exotic creatures in their ability to be at home everywhere and lacking any emotional response to the exotic all around them. Or, there is Mr Dronnink, a Dutch musical genius ruined by a woman and by drink, ‘burnt out’ and reduced to playing the piano on cruise ships. And we have vivid pictures painted of the experience of a tropical night on the ship; of storms, of cockfights, of the ‘coffee coast’. The characters seem straight out of the world of Agatha Christie; we only need an unexplained body or two to transform the already eerie atmosphere of the memoirs to that of 1920s crime fiction.
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