Sarah Helm

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

  I asked all of these ladies if they remembered Prince Peter Wittgenstein or had heard about a love affair with Vera. Mona Lalu remembered him well. He was certainly manager at Crasna when she knew him, she said.

  What was he like?

  “Oh, he was very big and solid and passionate about hunting. He was a very gay man. He had a big, round face—no hair. But he had a certain…” She paused. “A certain style.”

  Did she remember anything about a love affair between Vera and Peter Wittgenstein? “No,” she replied. I said that Vera told stories late in life that Wittgenstein had fallen in love with her and offered her diamonds and amethysts.

  Mona Lalu raised a carefully plucked eyebrow.

  “Even if it were true, it would not have been possible,” she said. “It didn't matter that she was a Jew. That is not what I mean. My mother's family had many Jewish friends. It is true that there were many rich Jews who were not liked at that time. The managers of estates, you know, were often Jews and they were not popular. But the Rosenbergs owned Crasna. That was different. And they had many friends. I had many friends who were Jews. And, of course, the Jews were persecuted during the war. I saw them myself sent out to shovel snow.”

  “But would families like yours have married Jews?”

  “Marry Jews—no, that was not so often,” she said.

  Would Peter Wittgenstein have married Vera? Would he have married a Jew?

  “No,” said Mona Lalu emphatically. “He had come from the pogroms in Russia. He had a coat of arms. I don't think he would have considered marrying a Jew.”

  We rushed now to look inside the house because it was getting dark and Yaroslav announced there was no electricity. We entered the gloomy vaulted hallway, where a nurse in white overalls was shuffling through a doorway. The hall smelled cold and damp, like a dungeon.

  Yaroslav gestured to us to go upstairs. It was hard to see, but I seemed to be brushing past another nurse in white carrying a bucket.

  “There are patients in these rooms?” I asked, and my voice echoed.

  “Yes,” said Yaroslav. And he slapped his chest. We were in a TB hospital. “Come, come,” he said. He seemed excited.

  At the top of the stone stairs we turned into a room that was completely dark. Yaroslav threw open the shutters to draw in as much of the fading light as he possibly could. He looked more like a pixie than ever. Strange shapes appeared; in the gloom they looked like reclining sculptures. They were large lumps of metal with levers and dials. We were in Max's salon, now Yaroslav's radiography room. This was where patients were once X-rayed, he explained, but now there was no power to operate the machines. Yaroslav disappeared a moment before reappearing with a little folder, which he laid down on the X-ray table and opened up. He had been collecting information about the house for years, he said. “History is my hobby.” Now he was pulling out black and white photographs of exquisite mural paintings, and he pointed up to the roof showing where they once were. The house, he said, was more than three hundred years old. Many of the murals dated back to Ottoman times. But they were all lost in a fire in the 1960s.

  He walked over to a giant stone and wrought-iron stove in one corner of the room. This was the original stove. It still worked if lit, and he pointed at the long black chimney flue running up to the ceiling. He opened the door of the furnace and told us the stove was here when the boyar Illshi owned Crasna. Several dynasties had owned the place. Max Rosenberg bought Crasna before the First World War, he thought.

  Was it true that Rosenberg built the railway and the timber factory? Everyone around the X-ray table looked at Yaroslav. “Yes,” he said. I told him that this made sense, because two of Max's brothers had first started timber mills and built railways not far away from here in the Maramures. At this Zinni suddenly exclaimed: “The Maramures, you say. Mon Dieu! In the Maramures? Well, that explains everything.”

  “Why?” we all asked.

  “I have always wondered why the young men of Crasna dance in the style of the Maramures. It is so different from dances of the other villages round here,” said Zinni, and danced a little to show us. “C'est une danse très excitée.” The Rosenberg workers from the Maramures must have come to work in the mill at Crasna, we all agreed, and brought their dance with them.

  “When did Rosenberg leave Crasna?” I asked Yaroslav.

  He didn't know exactly. “Rosenberg borrowed a lot of money from the bank in Switzerland to build the factory, and he could not pay it back. He lost everything. He had to sell the place to Nicholas Mavrocodat sometime in the early 1930s.”

  What happened to him? Yaroslav did not know. He proudly laid out more and more pictures of coats of arms and Ottoman carvings, but now there was only the weakest of evening light coming in from the window with which to summon up the past.

  I suggested we leave, as I wanted to look around the village. Zinni said she knew of a man who might be old enough to have worked in Rosenberg's factory.

  We were outside again, and we paused to look at trees. Rosenberg loved to plant trees, said Yaroslav, and I showed him a photograph of Vera and her aunt May standing next to a new sapling in front of the house. As we left, the mathematics teacher raised his glass to Rosenberg up on the balcony. “Would you care for a schnapps?” he said with a laugh.

  We piled back in the Trabant and drove down past Max's timber mill, its arching and bowing limbs now silhouetted against the setting sun. We left the main street, branched off up a hill, and immediately began skidding in mud and slush, the steering wheel spinning in Constantin's hands. The houses were getting smaller and smaller and soon were little more than shacks. We got out into ankle-deep mud and dirty snow reddened by the sunset, and trudged along a track in single file behind Zinni. She stopped outside a shedlike building on stilts. A pair of stiff leather boots, encased in mud, stood neatly beside the door.

  Zinni knocked. As if he had been waiting for us, the old man came to the door, stepped forward, turned to look down at us, nodded, and listened to Zinni, who explained our purpose. He was in stockinged feet, standing next to his boots, wearing woollen trousers and a thick brown leather belt with lots of hooks and straps for tools, fastened over a woollen jacket also held together across his chest by a large safety pin. His face was scored deep like bark. His name was Petrov Tadaodyk, and he was born in 1917.

  As Zinni explained why we had come, the old man's expression did not change, but when she mentioned the name Rosenberg, he suddenly began talking.

  Of course he remembered Rosenberg. He worked for him. The factory was built by Rosenberg, he said, and Petrov pointed towards the mill, which was now pumping out smoke down the valley. He started working there in 1930 when he was thirteen years old. He had to learn his trade, of course, and it was hard. His job was to cut the wood to length and shave it down. The wood was exported by train to Leningrad and also to England. They made panels that measured 2.3 metres by 90 centimetres, and he held out his fingers to show the width.

  What did he remember of Rosenberg?

  “He was rich—an important man. He was a good employer. Good to his workers. The salary was paid once a month, but you could get an advance if you ran short.”

  They made the very best wood in Bukovina. Everyone was proud to work there, he said.

  Did he remember the Rosenberg family at all? Did he remember a young woman perhaps?

  “No, no,” he said. The workers had nothing to do with the family. Rosenberg didn't mix with people in the town. They had a car. There were big parties at the house. Grand people came and went.

  Did he remember a Prince Wittgenstein, by any chance?

  “Wittgenstein?” he said, looking at me as if I had mentioned a ghost. “Yes, of course. He was my boss. Yes, he was a Russian prince. He managed the estate and the factory. He had a house right in the town, where the senior school is now. But he had a big house in Czernovitz too.”

  I asked Mr. Tadaodyk when Rosenberg left, and he could not recall exactly but did remem
ber the “bad time.” Rosenberg went bankrupt.

  Everyone knew about it. We worried for our jobs, he told me, but then the factory was sold.

  Were there many Jews living here in Crasna at that time?

  Yes, he said, there were many.

  Did he think Rosenberg was a Jew?

  “Rosenberg? A Jew? He was a German or Austrian, was he not? He was a boyar.” No. Rosenberg didn't have anything to do with the Jews in the town. The Jews were the merchants, the shopkeepers—not the bo-yars. And he started to list some of the Jewish names of those who had lived here: Goldstein, Zonestine, Himner, Moses, and so on. And then he pointed to a house across the street and started talking faster and gesticulating.

  Zinni had again stopped translating and was simply saying “oh,” her face expressing disbelief and dismay. Something shocking from the past was spilling out here in the dusk, and Zinni thought I should not know about it.

  “What is he saying?” I asked.

  “Oh, just bad things.”

  I told her I wanted to hear exactly what he was saying.

  “He said the fascists took all the Jews of Crasna away. They killed them in the town nearby.” Then she looked at the mathematics teacher as if she were concerned that she should not be saying what she was saying.

  Petrov Tadaodyk went on. “They took them to Ciudin, where there was a prison. And all the ones that were put in prison were shot. And then they dug a great big hole and threw the bodies in.”

  He paused a minute, and we all shifted in the mud, watching him. Zinni looked quite horrified by what she was hearing. Petrov started talking again and pointed down the road, raising his voice a little, then swinging around at the hips as if he were shooting a gun. Zinni was once again transfixed and forgot to translate.

  “What did he say?”

  “He is talking of a family he knew. The Besnar family. They were Jews. The mother was a widow, and there were two sons. They owned a shop. They lived just over there,” said Zinni, pointing down the road.

  “He says he remembers that one day the fascists came for them and shouted and ordered them into a truck. One of the boys refused to get in. He was shot right there, where he was standing.” We all looked down the street to the spot where we imagined the boy was shot.

  Then the old man said: “Besnar. Eti Besnar.” We learned that Eti Besnar was the mother's name and that she had a grocery store. “They were all thrown in a hole in the middle of the night.”

  It was the Germans, of course, Zinni said to me, but Mr. Tadaodyk heard what she said and understood, interrupting and wagging a finger: “No, no. It was the Romanian fascists,” he said. Then they discussed how, when Romania entered the war on the Nazi side in 1941, Romanian fascists poured into northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to join the German advance on Russia, butchering as many as thirty-three thousand Jews on the way. More than 150,000 Romanian Jews, living in areas such as northern Bukovina, which had been annexed by the Soviet Union just a year before, were then deemed to have been “Bolshevised” and were transported to labour and extermination camps. This, however, was years after Rosenberg and his family had gone. They had left Crasna well before the war.

  We were leaving now as it was almost dark. Everyone was quite sombre. Zinni pleaded with me to stay a little longer and meet the schoolchildren. I took her details and promised to write.

  It was quite black by the time we reached Ciudin—too black to look for graves. After a long time white floodlights appeared, and frying-pan faces were soon staring at my papers again. A young Romanian guard looked up from under his cap and smiled cheekily. “De Anglia?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Busy as a bee, busy as a bee,” he said.

  I asked: “You speak English?”

  He grinned again. “Busy as a bee, busy as a bee.”

  I was back. Ion was hunched up in the Merc waiting for me. Over eggs and bread in the warm café we wondered if Petrov Tadaodyk was the only witness to Eti Besnar's death. Had the story of what happened to Eti and her boys ever been told before?

  When I tried to phone Zinni the next day to thank her, I could not get through. When I wrote, I got no answer. I have still not had an answer.

  12.

  A Mountain Picnic

  Ion turned the car south, and Crasna sank back into obscurity. Striking into the heart of the high mountains, along the valley of the River Tro-tus, we were closing in on the border with Transylvania, looking for the place where, one weekend in May 1932, Vera had come for a Whit-sun gathering. I had with me the photograph of the gathering—the one I had shown to Vera's Romanian friend Annie Samuelli, picturing Vera, Annie, and others on horseback. I now also knew from Uncle Siegfried's memoir that the place I was looking for was called Vallea Uzului.

  Vallea Uzului was where Vera's uncles Siegfried and Arthur had made their home in the 1920s and built a thriving timber mill. In the early 1930s it became Vera's second home. Every Whitsun weekend the brothers held an extravagant picnic to mark a spring festival. The guests were lavishly entertained: they stalked deer, hunted wild boar, fished in the trout streams, and ate and drank. The weekend was also an opportunity for Vera's uncles to entertain important contacts.

  On the guest list for the picnic in 1932 were several influential names, including the German ambassador to Bucharest, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. Vera did not want to miss the weekend, not least because the German ambassador had been paying her much attention of late. What Vera could not have known as she rushed to catch the train north from Bucharest was that this Whitsun picnic was going to be the last of its kind. A year later Hitler's accession to power was to unsettle even those living in this remote corner of the Carpathians. Vera's personal life was already undergoing dramatic change.

  Sometime in 1932 Max Rosenberg again went bankrupt and was forced to sell Crasna. The world financial crash must have precipitated his plight, but his brothers had not been so badly affected, and there was a certain mystery about Max's latest bankruptcy. Perhaps he simply ran up higher debts than his brothers, possibly by taking more risks.

  At the same time Max had fallen seriously ill, and by early 1932 he had no money to pay for care in any of Vienna's famously lavish sanatoria. Instead he was consigned to the shabby Purkersdorf Sanatorium in the Vienna Woods, and he died on October 3 that year.

  Like his bankruptcy, Max's final illness was something of a mystery to everyone. No doubt brought on in part by his financial worries, his illness and death became a taboo subject, and his family rarely spoke about him again. Only in later years would Vera sometimes fondly recall her father's loving kindness—for example, the present he gave her on her twenty-first birthday: that luxury trip on a steamship to Alexandria.

  A schoolgirl named Ann Rogers, the daughter of an oil manager in Bucharest, caught a glimpse of the dying Max when she visited the Rosenberg family in an apartment in Vienna in 1932 on her way back to school in England. “I saw Vera's father lying on a bed of some sort, quite covered up in bandages. He was wrapped from head to toe, all white. I could only see his face.” According to the Purkersdorf Sanatorium records, Max suffered arteriosclerosis and died of a pulmonary embolism. There was nothing shameful in such a death. Yet the records showed that not one member of his family ever visited him there. Perhaps Max's death was taken as the moment to bury and obliterate their German-Jewish roots for good. His father gone, Wilfred for one, hastily changed his name by deed poll from Wilfred Rosenberg to Guy Atkins, acquiring his British naturalisation just one year later, in 1933. Yet the taboo about Max's death and bankruptcy still seemed unexplained.

  What was clear, however, was that with Max's death the dreams that the family had begun to see realised at Crasna were now shattered. Any prospect Vera had of marrying a man like Prince Wittgenstein—had she ever wished to—fell away. Harsher realities now suddenly had to be faced.

  The family were not left destitute. Vera's mother, Hilda, always had her own money, provided by her wealt
hy father, Henry Atkins, in South Africa. Money was still available in 1931 to send Vera to London for a shorthand-typing course at the fashionable Triangle Secretarial College (where she learned to type to “Tiptoe Through the Tulips”) and, the following year, to send Guy to Oxford.

  Nevertheless, on returning to Romania from her training in London, Vera immediately looked for work, finding a post as a secretary with the Polish representative of a small American-owned oil company, Vacuum Oil. And by the early 1930s she and her mother were living modestly in a small apartment in Bucharest.

  The young woman who was heading to the Whitsun picnic in Vallea Uzului in 1932 was therefore very different from the girl in the debutante pictures at Crasna. Although still only twenty-three, Vera had turned herself almost overnight into a self-reliant working woman who would endeavour never to depend on another's money or patronage again—a trait that was remarked upon throughout her later life. “There was something strange about Vera,” a South African cousin, Barbara Ho-rak, recalled. “She never wanted anything that she had not chosen herself. She once told me she had sixteen ball gowns in her wardrobe, and she never wore them because each was chosen by her mother. I think she reacted against this.”

  Vera was enjoying her newfound independence. In Bucharest she was no longer chaperoned around but chose her own networks of friends. And for their part, Vera's uncles considered their niece quite mature enough to play the lady of the house in Vallea Uzului (Arthur's wife was seriously ill and Siegfried was unmarried), where she could not only choose the menu but also ski, fish, ride, and no doubt stalk deer alongside the men.

  Vera, however, nearly didn't make it to the picnic that Whitsun weekend, as Annie Samuelli told me. Vera had invited Annie, also by then a working girl, to join her for the weekend, and the two had arranged to leave their offices early and meet at Bucharest station in time for the last train north. “We were to leave late on Friday morning and to meet on the platform. I was ten minutes late. Vera didn't lose her temper often, though she could often be extremely cutting. But on this occasion she was in a rage. As soon as she saw me, she said, ‘Get your stumps moving or we'll miss the train.' But I was too slow and we missed it.”