Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  Now it was the turn of the Ukrainian guards. “A book!” exclaimed one, asking me what my business was. “About a woman from Krasno'ill-shi? This is interesting to you?” He tilted his head. Eventually the border post spat us out the other side.

  Constantin was chattering away again as we drove north into Ukraine towards the town of Czernovitz. Did he know where he was going? We turned sharply left, then stopped and took in an elderly couple loaded with baskets. At a place called Liborca the higher peaks of the Carpathians were suddenly visible, and we stopped again, where more rusting pipes looped over the road, and picked up an old man with a mouthful of gold teeth, and suddenly everyone in the car kept saying “Krasno'ill-shi.” We were trailing slowly behind a cart full of plump women sitting on logs, chewing gum.

  Back across the River Siret again, we began to climb through woods, and soon we were winding through the streets of a wretched place called Ciudin, which I had found on my map. “Krasno'illshi 23 kilometres,” said a sign, but suddenly, about two kilometres further on, we were there.

  “School, school, école, école.” I was trying to explain to Constantin that we must find the village school because it was my only hope of finding somebody who spoke French or English. We tried a senior school, where we were greeted by a thousand staring eyes, but here nobody spoke anything but Russian. Krasno'illshi was a sizeable little town of plain houses lining muddy zigzagging streets, but I hardly noticed it, too busy looking for a large mansion with a lake and stables. Instead we passed a huge decaying pile of iron—a factory of some sort, with conveyor belts suspended in the air on what looked like pulleys ready to tumble any moment. We passed a large onion-domed church, newly painted pale blue and gold. And then we saw a mass of pretty bobble hats and plaits and little girls playing hopscotch. It was the junior school. Zinovia Iliut spoke French, they told me. She was the history teacher. She was sent for.

  A round-faced woman with intelligent, dancing eyes and nut-brown skin, wearing a green sweater and long skirt, Zinovia appeared, half-smiling, half-suspicious. I explained I was a writer trying to find out about somebody who had once lived at Crasna. Did she know the history of the town? Did the name Rosenberg mean anything to her?

  She looked quite blank and still nervous. No, she said emphatically. History here had been wiped out. “Avec le communisme, c'etait coupée,” she told me, making a chopping gesture with her hands.

  Then Zinovia looked at me more closely. Where had I come from? How did I get here? “De Anglia,” piped up Constantin as if he had personally brought me all the way from Anglia.

  “De Anglia?” she said, wide-eyed. “It is a miracle.” She looked at Constantin again for confirmation. He nodded smugly.

  “Pas possible,” said Zinovia, and laughed. She took us through to a teachers' common room and, sitting down, explained that when this part of Bukovina was cut off from the southern part, everyone was told to forget their past. It was forbidden to teach the children about Romania for many years, and they did not learn their own language. They learned Russian. “We are a forgotten community. We have learned not to ask questions about the past.”

  I asked: “Is there a large house here in Krasno'illshi—an old estate of any kind?”

  “No! No, not at all. Nothing like that,” Zinovia said, and glancing anxiously at Constantin and then at a group of other teachers, she led me alone into another room.

  Zinovia then told me she knew of a little booklet about Krasno'ill-shi; a kind of history. She said she had a friend who had a copy.

  While we waited for her friend to bring the booklet, I tried to probe Zinovia further. Were there Jews in the town? There were once many, she said. In Ciudin there was a school for Jews and a synagogue. But they left. Where did they go? “We do not know. It is better not to ask these things.”

  At that moment her friend arrived and swiftly pulled a little white booklet from her bag and passed it to Zinni. (She had asked me to call her Zinni.) She read the title. The booklet was in memory of a local poet, Ile Motrescu, who disappeared from Krasno'illshi. How did he disappear? “We don't know. We do not ask.”

  Zinni got up to shut the door. Children were now lining up outside the window ready to leave at the end of their day. She sat down again and started to translate the Romanian into French for me, apparently intrigued.

  ‘In 1613 the community at Crasna was attached to the monastery at Putnah and the forests that surrounded the town were rich and famous and bought by the local boyar, Alexander Illshi, who built the church,' she read. “ ‘During the Austrian period the factory making wood was built and became the biggest in Bukovina. It was made by the Austrian boyar Rosenberg in the first years of the century. He built a railway from Ciudin to Crasna 6 kilometres long to transport the wood.'

  I looked up.

  “Rosenberg. Yes, it says here Rosenberg,” Zinni said. “So you were right.” She was now quite excited and read on.

  “There was a château in Crasna built by Alexander Illshi in 1750. Many famous people lived here—the Starcea family, Rosenberg, and Nicholas Mavrocodat.”

  “So there was a château?” I said. Was she quite sure there were no remains of such a château here in the town today?

  “No. It no longer exists. That is for sure. It has disappeared since those days.”

  She continued: “ ‘Krasno'illshi had the forests, and Crasna Putnah was connected to the monastery. The Russians united the two parts and called it Krasno'illshi. The château was surrounded by beautiful parks with trees of different types, and in 1949 it was designated a sanatorium.' ”

  I looked up again. Zinni paused and reflected.

  “Is there a sanatorium here today?” I asked.

  “Yes. It is just here.”

  “Where?”

  “Just over the road from this school. You must have driven past it. It is behind the trees.”

  “Could it be the château?”

  The idea had never occurred to Zinni.

  “Can we go and look?” I asked.

  “I suppose we can,” she said.

  I rose and picked up my bag. “Can we go right now?” I said. It seemed to me there was absolutely nothing to stop us walking over the road that second and straight back into Vera's past.

  Across the road were two elegant stone gateposts that opened onto a drive. By the time we reached the gateway, we had collected Constantin once again and a gaggle of new guides, including the school's mathematics teacher and his friend.

  My new guides looked at me and agreed that it was a “miracle” that I had come all the way from Anglia. Then we started to walk up the drive together, stopping periodically as they turned to look at me again, as if I were not quite real.

  We kicked up dust and leaves as we went, and a figure passed by pushing a wheelbarrow. To our left was a pile of fallen masonry—a building constructed by the Russians, I was told—and another hideous rusting pipe. We climbed over debris strewn around, and I smelled a stench of decay and then a strong scent of pine. We continued farther and walked into an opening. A large structure came into view, not suddenly but gradually, as if it had been lurking there, shabby among the trees.

  I walked round quickly to the front and stood back to look. The château was encased in blistering paint but had lost none of its grandeur. The distinctive portico was instantly recognisable from one of the photographs I had with me—six stout pillars holding up a large balcony. Max had been photographed standing up there on the balcony and on horseback in the drive behind me.

  An old man was now walking towards us, picking his way across wet grass and melting snow. He wore a black pointed woollen hat and was very thin, with a stubbly face that seemed silvery grey. He was carrying something flat, like a large photograph. My new friends greeted him and called him over. This was Yaroslav, they said; he would know everything. “He is the historian of Crasna,” they chorused.

  I saw that what Yaroslav was carrying was an X-ray. The plastic sheet was flapping in the breeze.
It seemed to be of somebody's chest, as I could make out a rib cage. The old man was the radiologist at the sanatorium, the math teacher explained. Yaroslav had a pixie face and was quizzing me with his eyes.

  “Where would you like to see first?” asked the math teacher. Outside perhaps? The stables or the tennis court? Yaroslav wanted me to come inside straight away so that I could see his papers on the history of the house, but the math teacher insisted I follow him while there was some light. We looked at the stables, and I imagined where the photograph of Vera cradling the dog had been taken. She was perhaps twelve in that picture. Wilfred by then had followed his brother Ralph to prep school in England and would soon go on to Radley College, while Vera was left behind alone in Romania, to be educated by governesses. It seems that it was Max who opposed the idea of sending Vera away at a young age, perhaps because he wanted to keep her close. “My father definitely had a dislike of the practice of English girls' public schools,” she once said.

  Though Vera spent the winter months in Bucharest with her mother—who, according to Annie Samuelli, hated Crasna—she visited her father at Crasna as often as she could and spent all her summers here, riding, picnicking with friends, and running around with the schnauzers over the vast grounds. Her brothers returned for summer holidays. In front of the stables was where another of Uncle Siegfried's photographs had been taken—one with Siegfried grinning, riding in a sleigh “with curly bits on,” his niece and nephews behind him. I had also seen a picture taken of Wilfred and Vera sitting in a pony and trap on the drive.

  I was beginning to understand another reason Max had chosen to return to Crasna. Here he could try to re-create the happy family home he had known in Kassel, with animals and space for children to play. In Kassel the Rosenbergs were raised “in a very free way,” wrote Siegfried, “but if we did something wrong our father talked to us very seriously. He was very strict when it was about the truth. And we could always tell our parents everything without being afraid.”

  I had a sense that Max might have taken a similar attitude. Vera certainly adored her father, as she had told friends in her older years. “It was her mother who was the problem,” Zenna had told me. “My father said Hilda always wanted Vera all to herself. And when men came along, she stood in the way every time.”

  And here, at the back of the house, was a large mossy patch where the ornamental lake once was. I had seen a picture of a priest in robes standing on a tiny bridge that crossed the lake. Max acquired a papal medal while he was at Crasna, apparently for helping to build a nearby Catholic church. Attempts to bury the Rosenbergs' Jewish roots had already begun.

  But however much she loved to be at Crasna, Vera too would be sent away to be educated. She rarely talked about her education, and when she did she was dismissive, saying she had had no real education. “It was a long time ago when many parents, including mine, felt a girl's education was not of particular interest or value. Girls were educated for life in general—for social life, languages, and other little essentials.” Vera was not, however, quite truthful when she said she had had “no real education.” At fifteen she was sent to Switzerland, to one of the most exclusive finishing schools in Lausanne. At Le Manoir, where the extras cost more than the fees, the “little essentials” she learned were perhaps not what she would have chosen to study, but they nevertheless left a very distinctive mark on her character.

  Thanks to Le Manoir, she would never be at a loss as to how to lay the most elegant dinner table, preserve a pheasant, or prepare the most luxurious linen for a perfectly turned bed. And Vera's articulated English was undoubtedly acquired in her diction classes—reciting Byron, say, or Swinburne.

  She went on to a further finishing school, Montmorency in Paris, also attended by her friend Annie Samuelli. Here the curriculum included a course on French culture, which, though taught at the Sorbonne, did not have the status of a degree.

  When Vera completed her finishing schools at sixteen, Max felt the time had come for her to have a little independence. As she once told a neighbour in Winchelsea, he had visited her when she was taking her final exams in Lausanne and promised that if she passed, he would grant her three wishes. She chose to have a puppy, to take a flight to England, and to have her long hair cut. The exams were passed with flying colours, the puppy ruined the hotel bedroom, a flight to England was arranged, and her hair was cut, much to her mother's fury. Hilda didn't want Vera to lose her plaits so young.

  “It is a wonder, is it not?” said the mathematics teacher, pointing to the “tennis court”—another muddy bog. “Imagine,” and he flicked his wrist as if in a backhand. My guides continued to point out the archaeology of the gardens with ever more enthusiasm, but the thin sun was starting to go down. We climbed back up the long flight of steps from the bottom of the garden to the veranda on the east side of the house, where the carcass of a rotting animal lay next to a pile of plastic bottles. Many portraits of Vera had been taken on this veranda. By now in her late teens, alluring in flowing silk and chiffon, she was always shown in these stylised pictures turning her eyes away from the camera, as if not quite comfortable as a debutante, with her fashionable new twenties bob.

  The pictures of Vera had obviously been taken after her finishing-school days, at the time when her parents considered her ready to be launched into society. In this corner of the former Austro-Hungarian empire “society” was a curious mishmash of Romanian, German, Austrian, and even Russian landowners and aristocrats: a place where a German-Jewish boyar's daughter might well be accepted, if not in all circles, at least in some. After all, Max himself employed a White Russian prince as his estate manager. Prince Peter zu-Sayn-Wittgenstein, whose father was killed in the Russian Revolution, had fled Russia in 1918, crossing the Dniester River with his mother, brothers, and sisters to the safety of Romania, where he found himself in need of work. At Crasna he grew fond of Vera. In her old age Vera had, as I already knew, talked affectionately of Peter Wittgenstein, reminiscing about how he had once offered her a set of his family's jewels.

  Before leaving Bucharest on this expedition, I had spent time hunting down survivors of la belle époque who might remember Crasna, the Rosenbergs, or even Peter Wittgenstein.

  In the Romanian capital I found Mona Lalu, a member of what was once one of the richest Romanian noble families, sitting in a dark one-bedroom basement flat under the Hungarian embassy. Her family had once owned the whole building.

  Mona Lalu's mother's family, the Grigorceas, had a large estate in northern Bukovina, she said. “Yes, I remember Crasna very well. My cousin Nicholas Mavrocodat bought it from the Rosenbergs in 1932.”

  And then she got out old family trees and old maps. “But these roads have probably all gone now. We used to come down to Bucharest on the sleeper. The trains were excellent in those days.”

  “Did you go there often?”

  “Oh yes, I went there many times for parties or gatherings. It was a very old house—from the seventeenth century. I remember the hallway was dark and vaulted, with a big stone staircase up to the first floor. There were ornate murals on the walls and beautiful paintings.”

  A woman who still exuded faded grandeur, with her grey hair swept up in a jewelled comb, Mona Lalu spoke of a “most pleasant existence in Bukovina in those days.” “You were invited to stay as guests in grand houses in the summer. You played bridge and tennis and made expeditions. There was a large staff, and at the parties there was music and dancing. We had a gramophone and we danced the foxtrot, the Charleston, and then the South American cha-cha-cha came in.

  “Czernovitz was a most elegant town. There was a national theatre and music that came from Bucharest. The train to Munich was fast and quick. You took the train to the Polish border and then on to Breslau.”

  In huge tower blocks built by Ceausescu, I found other elegant old ladies in tiny flats who pulled out enormous family trees and showed me photographs of grand houses they had once lived in.

  Princess Ileana Stu
rdza disappeared into her miniature kitchen to serve an exquisite lunch of goat's cheese and beetroot salad, which we ate on our laps as she told me how her grandmother and mother had been ladies-in-waiting to Queen Marie. All young girls—not just Vera—in those days had an English nanny or governess. There was a Miss Stork and a Miss Collins and then there was Alice Goose (from Norwich), Blanche Snordell, a Miss Phyllis Parrat, and a Miss Michael. All took their charges for walks along the chaussée each afternoon and then took tea in the country club.

  Now Princess Ileana was tending her snowdrops on a narrow balcony as she talked of the time of her imprisonment. “The Communists just came and seized our forests.” She was locked up and put in a cell with no windows. Her family lost everything except a crate of furniture, which was stored in the ice cellar. “For years we children were told nothing of our past. It was better we didn't know.”

  I found Stanu Marescu along another dark walkway above a large neon sign. Stanu too had cleverly fashioned a new life in her little box of an apartment, where she chain-smoked, popping ash into a silver pot. When I asked what she remembered of life before the war, she replied in a husky voice: “Which war?”

  Then she said, “It was a good time,” and showed me a picture of her family's mansion at Botoshan. “But you know what? I don't care that it has all gone. Seven years my father was in prison for being an enemy of the people.”

  “Why?”

  “For being opulent.”

  More family trees came out, and the names were starting to sound familiar, many having intermarried. I wondered how much Vera had really wanted to appear in one of these family trees and what good these roots would have done her anyway. Her own family were to be scattered to the four winds before long, but so were all of these people. Stanu Marescu had ended all the way up here, on the twenty-second floor, above a flashing Samsung sign.