On the first morning Kenneth showed me round. ‘I shall no longer work in the outer office,’ he said. ‘My room is the first one after Nick’s. Next door is Dorothy’s office. This is your cubby hole.’ It was a narrow little room he had told me about after his first visit.
‘Now come and talk to Paul.’ Paul’s manner was hardly reassuring, but I was soon to discover that he had an almost infallible memory, which saved me from many blunders. In those days the map of the world showed large pink areas, all part of the British Empire, and we issued visas for a variety of territories, including such oddities as the German and French concessions in Shanghai. So many and various were the instructions for procedure that the sheets were punched and filed in a special loose-leaf book with metal rods a couple of inches high, and amendments were constantly coming in.
On the first morning we arrived well before the Visa Office opened so that I could discover where everything was kept and have some idea of what I was to do. ‘It’s very simple,’ said Kenneth. ‘All the instructions are in here,’ he pointed to the fat loose-leaf manual. ‘Look up every applicant in the card index.’ He showed me a bank of steel cabinets.
‘There’s no need to do that, Mr Benton,’ interrupted Paul. ‘Not with me here.’ In fact, I never found his memory at fault, but the proprieties had to be observed, if only in the presence of the clients.
‘See that the accounts come out right, but don’t let them get you down,’ said Kenneth. The petty cash was handled by Dorothy, but I would be responsible for collecting and accounting for the visa stamps and the money paid for them. ‘My predecessor left us a few spare stamps which will come in handy in case your balance is short. Don’t believe a word the customers say unless they can prove it, and try not to bother us.’
After this crash course in the duties of a visa officer Kenneth retreated to the private part of the office, closing the door behind him.
At ten o’clock the main door was opened and the clients began to arrive. They were a curious mixture, prosperous businessmen, rabbis with black caftans and long curls beneath their flat black hats, and pale anxious refugees. Most of our business was conducted in German, with occasional broken English. Paul’s German and Latvian were fluent and his Russian a lot better than mine.
It was clear that, as in Vienna, a large part of our clientele would be Jewish. The Jews in Latvia formed three distinct cultural groups, the German, the Russian and the Orthodox. Those from Courland and Livonia had officially adopted the German language and their representatives used it in the Saeima or parliament. Possibly as a result of the tradition of tolerance fostered by the Dukes of Courland they enjoyed a good working relationship with the Baltic barons, each of whom had at least one Jewish dealer who would come from the nearest town to supply farming equipment and buy up crops, or haggle over the price of timber from a strip of forest which the landowner wished to sell. Many of the city Jews engaged as middlemen also promoted Baltic German commercial enterprises.
‘Hitler must be wrong about the Jews,’ Kruedener used to say with a mischievous grin. ‘You can prove it by simple arithmetic. Every Balt, every German too, knows at least one good Jew. Now if they each know one, that adds up to millions, more than the whole Jewish population, so where are the bad ones?’
The Russian Jews, mostly settled in Riga, had assimilated well, but they took a keen interest in Russian affairs and used their own language in the Saeima.
The Orthodox Jews, more numerous than either of the other two groups, lived mostly in Latgale, where they were allowed to keep to their ancient religion and customs. It was they who waited so patiently in our office for visas to the Holy Land, and wrote diligently on the Hebrew typewriters in the Riga Post Office. In the Saeima their representatives spoke Latvian.
Whilst the well-established Jewish businessmen of Riga enjoyed considerable prestige and expected a certain amount of preferential treatment, the small traders from the Moscow Suburb and outlying settlements had always been accepted on sufferance as necessary, but subservient and rather distasteful members of the community, so it seemed quite natural to them that they should be ignored and constantly pushed to the back of any queue. In desperation they would resort to various dodges to attract attention. On the second morning I was disconcerted at being greeted by a rabbi on his knees who seized the hem of my dress and shuffled after me still clutching it.
‘This won’t do, Paul,’ I said. ‘We must take everyone in strict rotation. Keep a careful watch and make sure that no one manages to push in out of turn.’
Seeing that the office was to be run on orderly British lines, Paul decided that discipline could be extended.
‘I shall call you Frau Konsul,’ he announced, ‘and I shall see that the applicants do too.’
Restrictions on immigration to Palestine were now in force and stiff penalties were being imposed for illegal entry. This made alternative bolt-holes more valuable and, as in Vienna, there was growing interest in all sorts of distant havens. I decided that to show ignorance would destroy the confidence of the clientele, so every morning, before the office opened to the public, Paul would spread the visa instructions along the window sill in the passage and whenever I was at a loss for an answer I would say to an applicant, ‘Just a moment, I think I hear the telephone’, and disappear into the corridor. A moment or two later, with the facts at my finger tips, I would come back and say, ‘It was the Cayman Islands, wasn’t it? You will need ...’
One day, four dirty and dejected English boys—pre-war Hippies—appeared and asked for their fares home. They had been spending a serious-minded holiday in the Soviet Union and found it rather more serious than they expected. Somehow, they had crossed the Latvian frontier and reached Riga. If they had waited a little longer, I thought to myself, they might have been able to study the strange habits of the Russians without travelling quite so far. I explained that it was the Consul who dealt with DBSs (distressed British subjects) and that he would probably advance their fares against repayment in England, if they could find a way home.
On October 5th, the Russians arranged to lease air and naval bases from the Latvians at the ports of Liepaja and Ventspils. Latvian sovereignty, they said, would be unimpaired. Three weeks later they moved into the bases, discreetly, by sea. One saw no Russians in Riga, but everyone was aware that they were only one hundred and twenty miles away.
The Germans, anxious to build up an image of invincibility, announced in the Rigascher Rundschau that they had made a film of the Polish campaign called ‘Feuer im Osten’ (Fire in the East’) and that this would shortly be on view in the principal cinemas of Riga. Advance posters showing burning villages, blazing buildings, terror-stricken women and children, screaming horses and widespread destruction gave some foretaste of the treat in store.
My work in the visa office was a constant source of interest and even the fatigue at the end of a long day gave to quiet evenings at home a special savour. We decided to celebrate our good fortune while it lasted.
We started the evening at Schwarz’s Bar in the basement of the Hotel de Rome. The long counter was spread with a variety of delicious zakouski, still available from the ample stores of the hotel—red and black caviar, smoked salmon and trout and eel, cold meats, with mayonnaise and sour cream; lampreys, hardboiled eggs and ham with dill and salt cucumber and pickled mushrooms all arranged on small slices of white, brown or black bread. Vodka was served in glasses of various sizes, each with a special name, and it was important to choose the right one, as etiquette forbade any sipping and the whole glassful must be swallowed in one gulp, followed immediately by a zakouska held ready on a fork.
Upstairs in the softly-lit restaurant all the rich yield of the fields and rivers and forests was transformed into the special Russian dishes, chicken a la Kiev, salmon koulibiaka in a jacket of crisp pastry, blini with caviar and so on, which are often so disappointingly imitated in the West. As we sat down to our table my accordion teacher signed to
his colleagues in ‘the orchestra to play the Russian romances which I had tried so hard to learn.
Next morning, as it was Sunday, we were idling in bed over the special breakfast tray which Lotte produced as a weekly treat. The wireless set was propped up between us. Already, we were a little nervous of the small black box. We switched it on.
‘This is London calling in the Overseas Service of the BBC. A message from Riga states that all Germans in the Baltic States must return to the Reich immediately. Baltic Germans with Latvian passports may opt for German nationality, but they must reach an immediate decision. The Balts will be resettled in Western Poland, which now forms part of the Reich.’
Twelve hundred miles away the level voice went on with the morning bulletin.
We stared at one another in silence. The news was so completely unexpected, apparently the negation of German strategy. Who was behind this sudden migration? Was Stalin seizing his chance, as part of the German–Soviet deal, to root out the close-knit German organizations from the Eastern Baltic? Had the Germans decided that the consolidation of the former Polish territories would compensate for the failure of their long-cherished hopes of annexing the Baltic States? How could Hitler induce the Balts to give up their homes and relative plenty in exchange for an uncertain future in a Germany at war?
The answer was simple. These people would be driven out by the force of their own fear. One word, ‘Bolshevik’, was enough for those who remembered 1919—the penal island in the Daugava; the mass graves in the forest; the cellars which echoed to gun shots in the night. ‘If you stay in Latvia you will be unprotected,’ said the morning’s edition of the Rigascher Rundschau. But unprotected from what? From the Germans’ own allies, the Russians?
In fact, the carving-up of Eastern Europe had been arranged with complete precision and embodied in a secret protocol to the agreement signed by Stalin and Ribbentrop on August 23rd, 1939.
The Balts were still an important element in the Latvian economy, and their influence, especially in medical and university circles, was out of all proportion to their numbers. To drive them out so suddenly would cause considerable disruption. And what would happen to the shrunken but usually well-run estates of the Baltic barons—and to Rindseln?
On Monday morning I telephoned to the Kruedeners. The baron hesitated for a moment. The war had not changed their feelings towards us. Did we feel the same? Yes, they would like to come to dinner at once, as they were leaving almost immediately.
All through the day we worked feverishly, preparing correspondence for the Foreign Office Bag to London. There was unrest in the city; stories of trouble in the industrial suburbs across the river. Paul came back from lunch with the rumour that Russian troops were marching in. The day was dank and cold, and grey clouds swept up river from the sea.
The Kruedeners arrived at eight o’clock, he in a check suit which he proudly imagined to be typically English, and she still wearing the dress which had been old five years ago, the hem taken up a few centimetres and the buttons a little more rubbed. She held out her arms and kissed me. She looked thinner and smaller than before and the lines round her mouth had deepened.
This was the last chapter of the Rindseln story. Five years ago, when we had thought that Rindseln was to be our home, Jimmy Kruedener and I had sat under the lime trees and made plans, while the storks slowly circled over our heads. New shutters were needed. We would build a bigger diving board at the edge of the lake. We would put large stones, painted white, along the verges of the linden avenue. We would drain the duck pond and let the deep frosts of winter kill the thick blanket of water weed before filling it again. We would plant fruit trees. Some of these plans had matured. Last August the small estate had been serene and well-tended, with flowers round the house and a pair of young storks nesting on the roof of the stables.
‘Some of the apples will bear fruit next summer,’ Kruedener had said. ‘We have worked steadily these last years and put all we could spare into the orchards. When the apples are all bearing we shall live comfortably at Rindseln.’
And now they must leave, unquestioning, all they had worked for and the very centre of their lives, he bowing to the inevitable and she, dazzled by the mirage of a triumphant, welcoming Grossdeutschland.
‘We are to be given property in Poland,’ said Tante Hella. ‘Landowners will have estates similar to their own. Businessmen will take over Polish firms and shopkeepers carry on their trade. The same with doctors and lawyers. It is all being organized.’
‘And the Polish owners?’
There was an embarrassed pause.
‘Of course, financially it is wonderful for us,’ Tante Hella went on, almost as if repeating a lesson. ‘They will assess our furniture at a very high figure and we shall be paid for it in marks. They will compensate us handsomely for Rindseln.’ Her face clouded. ‘If I could take Rindseln with me I would be content. I wouldn’t wish for anything better—the old sofa and tables just as they are, and the oil lamps and the saddles hanging under the roof.
‘We shall go south,’ the Baron said, ‘to the great forests.’ He had talked so confidently of having his own forests restored to him when the Germans took over the Baltic States. ‘I shall get on with the Polish peasants better than those Germans,’ he went on. ‘I know the land, and I’m used to working with my men.’
‘But can you choose where you’ll go?’ we asked. They were so helpless and brave and so hopelessly misled.
‘We shall be landed at Gdynia,’ answered Tante Hella, ‘and there we shall be cared for. It is all arranged.’
It was like talking to someone who is suffering from a serious illness. You struggle to respond cheerfully to plans for a spring which you know they will never see. You use banal words to hide your concern.
‘How is Jimmy getting on?’ I asked.
‘He has a very good job now, assistant in a carbon dioxide factory at 250 marks a month.’ I thought of Jimmy, so independent when I had known him, working eight hours a day in a German industrial suburb.
‘Tell me,’ Tante Hella insisted. ‘Be quite open. After all, we can speak the truth to one another. Why does England want to take everything away from Germany.’
For perhaps ten minutes we tried to refute the more obvious falsehoods of Nazi propaganda, but her mind just closed in self-protection, and I regretted having threatened her fragile defences.
At midnight they left. ‘Write and tell us where this storm sweeps you,’ said Kruedener. ‘After the war we’ll meet again, perhaps in Poland. Who knows?’
Tante Hella pulled on the little brown woollen cap which used to hang on a nail in the hall at Rindseln. It was shabby when I was living there, but a fresh coat of paint on some part of the old house had always been more important to her than a new hat.
Chapter 11
The Baltic States, once a quiet backwater, now resembled an arm of the river which beneath the angry rays of the sun dwindles and turns turgid, while the fish crowd into the diminishing pools, thrashing and gasping in their anxiety.
A growing number of Polish refugees who had crossed illegally over the Grüne Grenze (the unguarded ‘green frontier’ which, before the days of the Iron Curtain, bounded large stretches of every country in Eastern Europe) crowded into the office each day to volunteer for the Polish Legion or seek a visa for somewhere. The would-be legionairies could at least be directed to the Polish Legation, but for the others there was little we could do beyond giving them sympathetic attention and making them feel that they were respected and of importance to someone, if only briefly. When a warning came from the Director of Passport Control that both the Russians and the Germans had planted spies amongst the refugees in the hope that they might gain entry to the UK, our concern became tainted with caution.
The genuine refugees were men existing without hope, just putting off the day when they would be discovered by the authorities and arrested, or deported to repeat the whole process in a neighbouring
State. Those who had documents presented them diffidently, as if they belonged to someone else. It was hard to disguise the shock of opening a tattered passport of a prosperous self-confident citizen bearing little resemblance to the man standing before one. Not only were the ‘illegals’ usually rather unkempt, but they bore a look of deep inner collapse, as if their framework had been damaged and no amount of shaving soap and clean linen would restore them.
As October drew to a close Riga was drowning in a sea mist which blurred the outlines of the city into the grey sky like colour-wash on a soggy paper. The last leaves hung wetly from the trees, their fugitive autumn tints drained away. And through the streets the furniture vans, loaded with the belongings of the Baltic Germans, moved slowly towards the docks. The first German ship was to leave for Gdynia on November 1st. Only the sick would be given cabins. The rest would travel in the hold.
Special arrangements had been made to speed the evacuation—marriage or divorce in two days, instant conveyancing of property and transfer of funds to Germany. The newspapers were full of advertisements for forced sales, and the flea market of the detritus from abandoned homes.
Eleven German ships were lying in the river, tied in a double bank along the quays of the Export Harbour. All but one had been taken from summer cruise runs and their sleeping accommodation was unheated.
As the evacuation gathered pace shops sold out of warm clothing and the Latvian Government closed the jewellers’ shops to stem the run on valuables. Rumours reached Riga of a shortage of soap in Germany, so people rushed to buy it up, until they found that they were not allowed to take extra packages with them. Trunks and suitcases disappeared from the shops, as well as the wooden boxes with iron handles used by the peasants. Late comers were obliged to use cardboard boxes which they loaded on to hand carts. As the wharves became congested, baggage was piled outside the dock gates. Furniture and possessions were to follow the evacuees, as well as the money they had been instructed to deposit in the Liepajas Bank for transfer to Germany.
Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes Page 7
