Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  “But, good heavens, what about our sensitive feelings?” I asked. “If she remembers us at all, she remembers us as gallery girls, and we’ve come back as nearly middle-aged women, if you like to look at it that way. What about our feeling scared?”

  Carle laughed at that, and said, “Oh, but you know what Rosa is.”

  We didn’t, of course. But it was gratifying to have it implied that we did. And then he went to fetch her.

  It was very strange, that last half hour before she came. Something like the nerve-racking wait for the phone call that first time we spoke to her again. We felt very keyed up until we heard the sound of the car returning, then all I could remember was Carle saying that she was scared at the thought of meeting us, and I said to Louise, “Don’t let’s leave her to walk in and have to make an entry. Let’s go down to her.”

  So we ran down the stairs from our Traviata room lookout and flung open her own front door to her.

  She stood there on the threshold, our Rosa, looking as we had always remembered her and had always hoped somehow to see her again. Her eyes were wide and dark, like a Verdi heroine, and there was that indescribable air of drama about her that was absolutely natural. She was as beautiful and glamourous as ever. And she was ours once more.

  “Rosa!” we cried in chorus. “Darling Rosa!” And we threw our arms around her and embraced her.

  It would be unrealistic to believe in a strict scheme of reward and punishment in this life, but I do know that was God’s reward to us for the refugee work.

  Really, there was very little we found to say to each other in the first few minutes. I think she was probably as moved as we were. But presently we began to talk very much of the past—it amused her to find that we remembered far more details of casts and dates and artists than she did—a good deal of the present and because we were already laying the foundations of a friendship that was to mean so much to us all, something of the future, too.

  It was impossible to describe in detail the full joy and wonder of that visit. Then, and on subsequent visits that followed over the years, she sang to us, told us operatic stories, answered our endless questions about the details of her career, showed us the glorious stage costumes she had worn, allowed us to take our pick of the tremendous collection of photographs she had and in every way, did all that she could to recreate for us the things which we had feared lost.

  Our greatest discovery on those early visits was that the voice, that dark, matchless voice that had set the standard for us for all time, was absolutely unimpaired. We also discovered that the fascinating, almost melodramatic personality that had enchanted us across the footlights was as endlessly intriguing offstage.

  At first, we simply could not resign ourselves to the idea that she absolutely refused to sing in public any more, and we pestered her with, “Why?”

  She finally came back with the indisputable reply: “For nineteen years, I was a slave to my art—and I mean a slave. I am not prepared to do that any more. But nor am I prepared to be less than perfect. That’s all.”

  Anything after those days at Villa Pace would have been an anticlimax, and perhaps it was just as well that they came at the end of our trip. It was hard saying goodbye, but we knew now that we had forged links that would never be broken. There was always Rosa, and we need never fear anything else.

  By the time we returned to England, we had not only done all the things we had vowed we would do, seen all the people we had determined to see and enjoyed every thrill that we had hoped to enjoy; we had also laid the foundations of a future in which we could expect something of the sort of crazy, delightful planning that had once been the breath of life to us.

  Life would, naturally, never be quite the same as when we were very young. We did not even wish it to be. All we had asked was that it might be recast in something of the old pattern, and up to a point, this had been accomplished.

  In the autumn of that year, we learned that the Vienna Opera Company was to pay London a visit. Krauss was to be among the conductors, and we knew that meant Ursuleac would come too. It was the first real news, as distinct from rumours and counter-rumours, we had had of them. All we had known for certain before then was that they were alive.

  Louise and I had vague ideas that the time would come when we could revisit Europe at last and find them. We had somehow never thought that it would be the other way around, that they would come to us. We had visualized our meeting in Munich, in Vienna, in Salzburg, in any one of those ghost-filled cities. Instead, we met them in Victoria Station, amid the whistling of engines, the rumblings of trucks and the impatient cries of porters.

  The train was full of Vienna Opera personnel. One figure after another from the old days presented themselves to our fascinated gaze, as Louise and I hurried from group to group, looking for the two who really mattered to us.

  And then we saw them.

  They had never expected us to be at the station. They had written several times, we learned afterwards, but none of the letters had arrived, and from us there had been only a deep and, I suppose, rather ominous silence. They had not even known that we were alive, until a very recent postcard from Mitia. Years of war had rolled in between, and who was to know how friends on opposite sides felt toward each other when so much blood had been spilt?

  There was not much doubt about how we, or they, felt as we ran to greet them. The sheer discovery of each other again was all that counted. Once more, the rapture of reunion. Once more, the exclamations, the questions, the half-answers, more questions and the endless exchange of news. It seemed that we would never be able to say or hear enough of what had happened in the years in between.

  And then, the next day, we took them for the first time to the flat; the place where we had worked out in detail the task on which they had, almost unwittingly, started us. The visit was a curiously moving experience.

  From the earliest days in the flat, we had amused ourselves by declaring that we would have them there one day. Now they were there, and amazingly at home they looked in that setting, too.

  We asked after their own beautiful flat in Munich. When a phosphorous bomb hit the place, the apartment and practically everything they possessed had been destroyed. We started to say something sympathetic, but Krauss dismissed our exclamations with a gesture of his hand.

  “Why complain?” he said. “We are alive, when many people are dead. We are lucky. Let’s admit it.”

  It was true, of course. So we talked instead of the days before the war, when we had dashed back and forth to the Continent under cover of those operatic performances. We discovered for the first time just how clearly they had understood what we had been doing, and just how completely they had cooperated on some occasions when we had not even realized the fact.

  We also learned, not from them, but from others, that the work had not completely ceased when war broke. Even after that, they had had a hand in some interesting escapes, notably that of Lothar Wallerstein, the well-known operatic producer who, having escaped before the war, was caught again when the Germans entered Holland. Krauss and two other good friends from the Vienna Opera exerted much pressure and finally succeeded in having him released with permission to go to America.

  To Wallerstein’s credit, let it be said, he returned years later to testify on Krauss’s behalf at the de Nazification proceedings. Although he had resisted all attempts to make him join the Party, these proceedings were necessary because Krauss had held a high position in the German musical world throughout the war years. This was, understandably, the fate of many fine artists who had done no more than pursue their profession during those troubled years. I don’t think many of them resented the inevitable inquisition into their behaviour during those years. What was contemptible and damaging was the amount of intriguing and false witnessing among lesser artistic rivals who sought to oust those whose places they hoped to take.

  In connection with these same de Nazification proceedings, it is irresistible to tell one anec
dote that shows the true Krauss-ian touch of humour.

  He was asked—as he had to be asked—if he had ever visited Hitler at Berchtesgarten.

  “Oh, yes,” Krauss said frankly. “Certainly.”

  “How often?”

  “Once,” was the answer.

  “And when?” he was asked.

  “I cannot recall the exact date,” Krauss explained courteously, “but it should not be difficult to check. It was exactly one week after Mr. Chamberlain visited him there.”

  During the weeks that the Vienna Opera Company remained in London, there were countless meetings among those who had not seen each other for years. For us, the most significant and charming was a supper party we organized at a quiet Soho restaurant.

  There were nine of us. Krauss and Ursuleac, Louise and I, Mitia—representing the very beginning of our refugee work—and Elsa, and the three Maliniaks—almost the last people we had brought out of Europe, representing, in a sense, the completion of our work.

  We were all in tremendous spirits, though inwardly deeply moved to meet like this after so many years, and we were determined to drink a triumphant toast to “Reunion outside Vienna.”

  Our waitress, I noticed, was obviously interested in our group and beamed upon Krauss with such approval that I saw she must have recognized him. She so evidently wanted to say something that I whispered to her, “What is it?”

  It appeared that she wanted Krauss’s autograph.

  Guessing that he was in a mood to refuse nothing that evening, I told her to go and ask for it, assuring her that he would give it. Sure enough, he smilingly complied, and Louise, in sympathy with a fellow star-gazer, said, “If you collect autographs, you should ask this lady too. She is a very famous singer, Viorica Ursuleac.”

  “Why,” the girl cried, “of course! I hadn’t realized for a moment that it was Frau Ursuleac.”

  We all gazed at her in surprise, and I said, “Do you know them, then?”

  “Know them?” she exclaimed, flushing and laughing, and yet a little tearful too. “Know them? Of course I know them. I come from Vienna. Many, many times I heard Mr. Krauss conduct. I never thought I should wait on him in a London restaurant.”

  We were dumb for a moment. Somehow, she was a symbol, this unknown girl from Vienna, of all the thousands of grains of sand that had been stirred by the tide of history and now were settling down on the quieter shores. She was of the old days, and yet she was of the new. To her, Krauss and she were part of Vienna; to us, she and we were part of London.

  So I said, “Go and fetch yourself something to drink with us. We have met together for the first time for many, many years. We are going to drink a toast to our reunion. Come and drink it with us, because you come from Vienna.”

  She brought her glass to our table and we all stood up. I suppose the other people in the restaurant thought we were a bit mad. But we clinked glasses with each other across the table and drank to the fact that we had all, in our different ways, survived the hurricane that had swept over Europe and lived to smile at each other again in a London restaurant.

  It was a great moment. And if we laughed and made jokes about it, we were also near to tears. We might so nearly, any one of us, never have seen the others again.

  It was during the last week of the Vienna Opera Company’s visit that Louise and I made the final, and perhaps the happiest, decision in connection with the famous flat. We told Krauss and Viorica that we wanted them to regard it as their home whenever they came to England, to look on it as always ready and waiting for them when they were on their travels abroad. There was a certain unspoken poetic justice about their being able to regard as home the place that sheltered so many people we might never have known or helped, if they had not first committed Mitia to our care. On the day we accompanied them to Victoria Station to say goodbye, we gave them each a key, so that they would always know the place was theirs.

  Smiling a little, Krauss returned his key and said, “Only one is necessary, because we are never apart and shall always come here together.”

  Viorica said nothing. She just turned the key over and over in her hand. And we guessed and he knew—because he knew every mood of hers—that she was trying not to cry. We hugged her and told her to put it away safely. Then, because it was nearly time for the train to go, we kissed them both and watched them get on the train.

  They stood at the window together, smiling and looking very much as they had looked all those years and years ago, when I had photographed them outside Covent Garden. Then the whistle blew, and the train began to move.

  15

  Originally, this was intended to be just the story of two girls who followed their operatic stars through the comparatively carefree days of the 1920s into unexpected drama in the ’30s and ’40s; and when this book was first written, that was the full extent of the period it covered. But, looking back over a much longer period now, I realize that nothing is ever really over, and it seems to me unnecessarily arbitrary to break the narrative abruptly on that day in 1947 when we waved goodbye to Krauss and Viorica at Victoria Station. Consequently, in revising the book for present day publication, I have decided to take the story further.

  To a very great extent, the pattern of life for Louise and me has remained the same. That is to say, we are still inveterate star-gazers and voice-lovers. And, although we had supposed that our refugee work had stopped at the outbreak of war, for many years after the war, we found ourselves involved in work for displaced persons when we joined the Adoption Committee for Aid to Displaced Persons—later Lifeline. Unlike the pre-war refugee work, there was no sense of danger or high drama connected with this, but it did bring us very close once more to tragedy and deep human need.

  Our special interest covered the camps for non-German refugees in Germany, where there was a bewildering mixture of nationalities. Many of the unhappy inmates were Poles, who had been brought to Germany for slave labour during the war. They had been quite literally slaves for years, and when the end came, all that anyone could offer them was a return to Poland under the Russians. As this would mean either death or fresh slavery under different masters, they naturally refused. Temporarily, there was nothing to do but put them in camps.

  Then there were Russians who had fled from their own form of national persecution, Czechs who had escaped from either the Germans or the Russians, depending on the date of their flight. There were people from the three Baltic States.—Who even bothers to remember the very names of Lithuania, Estonia, or Latvia now? But when the Russians flooded in, many people escaped to the West, penniless and rootless.—There were a few Hungarians, some Ukrainians, and individuals or groups from almost any country you could name in Middle or Eastern Europe.

  Most of our work consisted of fund-raising for daily fresh milk provision for children under six, or helping to provide treatment and rehabilitation for the many tuberculosis cases. But we did sometimes go out to visit our camp, and so we came to know some of our cases personally, as well as the wonderful personnel who worked on the spot.

  The first time we went, we were vaguely expecting a sort of collection of Nissen huts. But we found that our particular camp was housed in a huge barracks. Inevitably, the accommodation consisted of large rooms; and in each of these rooms lived four, six, sometimes eight families—most of them hating each other, naturally. If you wanted a bit of privacy, you put up a blanket or a piece of cardboard, but that often shut out the light. They went to the soup kitchen, then they came back and sat on their beds. No wonder they thought they were the forgotten people, until World Refugee Year came.

  What does a human being crave when life has been stripped to the bone like that? The most strange and varied things. And in working with such people, you have to try to sympathize with what they want and not what your common sense seems to be telling you they should want.

  I remember an elderly Hungarian, whose tragic story included the loss of his whole family as well as his way of life. What do you
say to anyone like that? I put my arms around him and kissed him, and he broke down and wept. So did Louise and I, to tell the truth.

  Afterwards, when I asked the compassionate camp worker what we could do, he said, “It may sound strange and trivial to you, but what that man needs is a suit of new clothes. He came of very good people, and the squalor of being a refugee and having to accept charity is killing him. Someone else’s kindly donated second-and third-hand clothes are welcome to many people, but he needs something new. And he needs to go into the town and buy it for himself.”

  Fortunately, our committee was also compassionate and understanding. He was sent enough money from England to refit himself modestly, and he was asked to go and buy the clothes himself, as sizes were always difficult if one were buying for a friend.

  In some indefinable way, it helped him face life again.

  Then there was dear Mrs. Rafalsky. She and her husband had been on the run either from the Russians or the Germans for a large part of their adult lives. We used to manage to talk to each other in a strange mixture of languages, and Louise and I found that Mr. Rafalsky was also an opera lover. He could hardly believe that we actually knew the names of Russian singers like Neshdanova and Sobinoff, though only from records. He had heard them both, he told us, in a performance of Faust, the cast being completed by Chaliapin. Some cast!

  When Mr. Rafalsky died, his widow did not want food or warmth or comfort of any sort. She wanted a little headstone for his grave. When you have been a displaced person for half your life and even in death you have no place, I suppose a headstone means a lot.

  It was Rosa who paid for that headstone, I remember. When we told her the story she said, “That is something I completely understand.” I think Mr. Rafalsky would have liked to know that a prima donna paid for his headstone.

  One heartening thing about this particular aspect of refugee work was that, in the end, the problem was almost completely solved. Most of the displaced persons were either absorbed into the German community or they emigrated. It is one of the tragedies of this tragic century that as soon as one area is free of the refugee problem, another develops. But there is never a complete answer to anything that stems from man’s inhumanity to man. So one always goes on to another facet; though of course, as one gets older, it has to be a slightly less active part that one plays.