Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  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 G
erman 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 for 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.

  I knew that to speak in praise of any artist who occupied a high position in Hitler’s Germany is to tread on very delicate ground. At the first word, even now, tempers rise, private and professional axes are taken out and reground, and friendships tremble in the balance. But, in that homeliest of phrases, one must speak as one finds. Louise and I would never have started our refugee work without the encouragement of those two, and we could never have maintained it without their help. It would be ungenerous and untruthful to say anything else.

  And, though this has nothing to do with the ethics of the case, and is merely a fortunate circumstance, I very much doubt if we should have been able to force ourselves to go on with this harrowing and arduous task if the whole experience had not been irradiated for us by Krauss and Ursuleac’s superb operatic performances. Just as the pursuit of opera had originally brought us to the refugee work, so the pursuit of the refugee work was made possible only by the support—or, if you like, the bribe—of great operatic performances, which lured us back again and again.

  It is strange now to look back on those performances, probably the greatest all-around performances we ever experienced, set like jewels in the midst of that most horrible part of our lives. Not that some of the individual singers were not rather second rate. They were. But one of the few masterhands of operatic history directed the whole.

  Clemens Krauss was that phenomenon which occurs very occasionally in the world of music: the truly great operatic conductor. It used to be said of Krauss that he could see if there were too much light directed on a vase on the stage at the same time as hearing what was wrong with a phrase from the second trombones. He had a tremendous romantic grasp of a stage work, but an intensely practical eye for commonsense detail.

  I remember a rehearsal of Tosca, when the Scarpia was making great play with his lorgnette in the first act. First, he examined the portrait through it, and then later, he examined the fan. Krauss stopped the rehearsal immediately and said, with dry good-humour: “Herr So-and-so, you might decide if you are short-sighted or long-sighted. You cannot be both.”

  Three times in his life, he built up a great ensemble—in Frankfurt, in Vienna and in Munich—always by developing his singers, never exploiting them. Any singer who worked consistently under him always described him as a true singer’s conductor.

  “He sings with us,” explained Adele Kern, the lovely coloratura of his ensemble—and, incidentally, another operatic friend who was a wonderful help in the refugee work. She did not, of course, mean that he hummed and stamped—as has been done by various conductors, great and small, to the misery of those in the
front row of the stalls—but that he experienced and appreciated every problem and every opportunity the score presented to the singer. No wonder he could make a third-rate artist into a second-class performance, urge a second-class artist to heights never attained before and polish every facet of a first-class artist’s genius, so that each performer found that he or she was doing better than any previous best.

  I doubt if anyone who experienced his Ariadne auf Naxos or Cosi fan Tutte at the little Residenz Theatre in Munich will ever forget it; nor will he forget Die Frau ohne Schatten, or Palestrina, or a dozen others at the National Theatre.

  No wonder Richard Strauss considered that in Krauss and Ursuleac, he had found the perfect interpreters of his particular genius and dedicated his Der Friedenstag to them. Capriccio—of which Krauss wrote the libretto—was also composed for them. In the case of Der Liebe der Dane, which Strauss intended to leave as a posthumous opera, Krauss persuaded him to have it performed once. Because of wartime conditions—the war was more than half over by then—the work never came to public performance during the composer’s lifetime. But one presentation was given before an invited audience, in honour of the composer’s birthday, with Krauss conducting and Ursuleac in the title role.

  At the end, Strauss opined that it was the most perfect performance of any of his works, and that, having heard it thus, he was now ready to die. But, he added, if there were any attempt again to perform his work within his lifetime, he would give his permission only if the same cast were assembled and Krauss conducted.

  In view of some subsequent performances, one is bound to say one sees his point.

  Although Strauss roles were her speciality, Ursuleac was also a splendid Mozart singer, the best Senta in The Flying Dutchman we ever heard, and—though we regretted having to hear them in German—we still consider her Tosca and her Turandot among the finest in our experience. She was a first-class actress, and it is a pity that so few of her records give anything but a faint impression of her overall artistry.