Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins & the Missing Agents of WWII (25 page)

At this point Rabbi Hillel Avidan, one of Vera's South African cousins, took up the story for me, saying he was not surprised I had found Vera's history hard to fathom. The family liked to hide its Jewish roots.

Vera's maternal great-grandfather was born in 1766, in Gomel, Be-lorussia, and his name was Jehudah Etkins (or perhaps Etkin or Etkind). Jehudah's children, including Vera's grandfather, Henry (formerly Hein-rich and before that Hirsch Zvi) Etkins, were also born in Gomel. This isolated town near Chernobyl, north of Kiev and southeast of Minsk, was, by the nineteenth century, in the heart of the Pale of Settlement, where the majority of Russia's Jews were forced to live by the tsars, trapped in towns and shtetls. As many as twenty thousand Jews lived in Gomel in the nineteenth century, which was half its total population, and when, in the late nineteenth century, pogroms became a common occurrence, the Etkins family began to flee. Henry left from Odessa in the late 1870s, just before a spate of anti-Jewish riots.

Travelling via London, he moved on to Cape Town, then to Kimber-ley, where he supplied pit props for diamond mines. Henry Etkins and his wife Katherine (née Foyen) then returned to London, and in 1881 Zeffro Hilda was born in the subdistrict of St. Mary in the County of Middlesex, according to her birth certificate. The family's address was given on the certificate as 105 Christian Street, Brick Lane, London. Other Etkins brothers from Gomel were now settling in England, and Rabbi Hillel Avidan's grandfather had bought two tobacconist's shops in Streatham High Road, south London.

Vera's grandfather, Henry, however, was soon back in Cape Town accumulating wealth. He became a friend of Cecil Rhodes and other pioneers of the diamond fields. By the turn of the century, as more and more eastern European Jews poured into South Africa, Henry Atkins had successfully erased his own Russian roots and was now passing himself off as a true Englishman, which enabled him to join Cape Town's prestigious Garden Synagogue. No eastern European Jew was allowed in this synagogue—only Jews of English or German origin.

Henry then started new businesses, including the export of ostrich feathers. During the Boer War he sold large quantities of Australian frozen canned meat, flour, and oats to feed the British Army. He later
purchased the Lace Diamond Mine and became one of the biggest property developers in Cape Town.

By the time Vera's father, Max Rosenberg, arrived in South Africa in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Henry Atkins was an influential patron. “With the boom in building at that time my oldest brother became very rich,” wrote Siegfried Rosenberg. “He built houses and raised mortgages wherever he could.” He also became engaged to Henry Atkins's eldest daughter, Zeffro Hilda, known as Hilda, and the couple travelled to England for their marriage, which took place at the Central London Synagogue on November 12, 1902. Hilda, already born in England, no doubt hoped to entrench her English roots by making sure her marriage vows were exchanged there too. Afterwards the couple returned to live in South Africa, where their first child, Ralph, was born in 1905.

By this time the Boer War had precipitated a reversal in Max's fortunes. As Siegfried recounted, prices fell, and Max, unable to recoup his debts, left South Africa. “When he wanted to sell the buildings he could hardly pay back the mortgages so he decided to sell all his houses and leave.”

While Max had been in Cape Town, two of his three brothers, Arthur and Siegfried, had set out from Kassel to exploit the timber of Bukovina— the name means “beech forest”—which then lay on the eastern fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They then ventured farther to exploit the forests of Romania. Exporting timber from the Danube ports through the Black Sea to Rotterdam, Arthur and Siegfried were, by 1908, making a name for themselves on the Danube delta, where they had founded a successful shipping agency.

Paul, the youngest of the four brothers, stayed in Kassel and handled the German end of the business, now called Gebrüder Rosenberg Hand-lung.

“We had a good business so we told our older brother who had lost everything in South Africa to come and join us,” wrote Siegfried. “He came and took over the shipping agency at Galatz and at Constanza.” When Max arrived in Galatz, he brought with him his new young wife,
Hilda, and their son, Ralph. So this was how Vera's mother happened to be in Galatz in 1908 at the time when Vera was born.

Vera always regretted her father's decision to move from South Africa to Romania. In a unique moment of self-revelation, she said so openly during an interview with a British Home Office official when she was seeking naturalisation.

“Miss Atkins told me,” wrote the official, “that her father was unfortunately persuaded to enter the family timber business in Romania, and they all went there to live.” Had he stayed in Cape Town—even just for another three years—Vera would have been born in an English colony, with an automatic right to be English, which was what she wanted all her life. Instead, Vera was born in Romania. History would dictate that as a result she would have to fight to be recognised as English and would never really know—nor would anybody else—quite who she was or where she belonged.

Our Mercedes approached the western side of Galatz, dominated by the towering graveyard of iron that was the Sidex steelworks, one of Ceausescu's most monstrous bequests to his nation. The Danube, a mile wide at this point, stretched out ahead of us in a vast brown expanse, across which chugged a single dredger, attempting to remove decades of deposited mud and silt. When Max Rosenberg arrived here in the early twentieth century, the delta was crammed with vessels lapping up every opportunity for profit offered by this huge transcontinental waterway.

At that time Galatz itself had a thriving economy, owing in large part to the prosperous local Jewish community. The city's Jewish population was nearly twenty thousand strong—mostly small traders but also a substantial number of rich bourgeois Jews who, forbidden by law to own land, put assets into business or banking.

The Jews of Galatz had come from all over Europe, but the majority had arrived in the nineteenth century after fleeing persecution in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe, particularly Poland. They had been allowed to install themselves in certain parts of the city. One of these was the area around the central market. And here was 135 Domneasca Street,
the house where Vera was born. An elegant single-storey villa, shaded by linden trees, Vera's birthplace lay in the heart of the wealthiest Jewish quarter, now the poorest part of the city, abandoned in many places to beggars and Gypsies.

At the time of Vera's birth Max Rosenberg was fast rebuilding the fortune he had lost in South Africa, and soon he had started his own shipping agency, exporting the timber from his brothers' mills. He also began to borrow again, to build shipyards in Galatz and Constanza. By 1908, the year Vera was born, the family was able to adopt the luxurious colonial lifestyle which at that time prevailed among Romania's expatriate community. As nations vied for their slice of trade and political influence in the Balkans, diplomats and international businessmen poured into the ports of the Danube delta, and Max's position as a powerful businessman gave him an automatic entrée to this set. Soon the family had moved to a larger house in Braila, another flourishing Danube port.

However, the atmosphere in the family home was not always happy, in large part because Hilda was homesick for South Africa, or, as Vera put it in her Home Office interview, “my mother did not settle well” in Romania. Hilda nevertheless did her utmost to ensure all the “Englishness” she had absorbed in colonial Cape Town and on her visits to London was maintained, and English was the first language the children learned. Indeed, though French culture dominated much of Romania, Englishness was the height of fashion in cosmopolitan circles before the First World War, especially after the arrival of the much-loved Queen Marie, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who married King Ferdinand of Romania in 1893 and imposed her own very English style on the country's royal court.

The Rosenberg family's entrée into the highest echelons of Romanian society came about also through their close connections with the Mendl family, one of the most prominent Jewish families in Braila. The Mendls, originally from Trieste, also had strong ties with England.

Perhaps during a visit to see her sister in Galatz, May Atkins, Hilda's elegant younger sister, met Anthony Mendl, a wealthy businessman. Anthony and May were married in London, and soon afterwards Nina Mendl, a cousin of Anthony's, married Max's brother Arthur.

Teresina Mendl, another cousin of Anthony's, whom I met in Paris
just a few days before her hundredth birthday, recalled with a smile “la vie coloniale” that they all enjoyed in the Danube ports at this time. “We all had big houses, we had servants.”

The rich, especially German-speaking Jews, looked to Vienna for culture and entertainment. “In Vienna,” Teresina told me, “they went shopping, consulted the renowned specialists, had check-ups and cures. They enjoyed Viennese operettas and great opera singers. From Vienna they ordered their furniture and brought the latest style in embroidered tablecloths and so on.”

In those days, Teresina said, the young men might be educated abroad—perhaps in England. Vera's elder brother, Ralph, was sent to an English prep school as soon as he was old enough. But the girls were educated at home and never went out unchaperoned. So Vera, by the age of six or seven, would have had a governess who accompanied her at all times.

Teresina then revealed that she remembered Vera as a tiny girl. “Elle était un enfant très tranquil. Très reposé. Toujours calm. C'est tout.”

How far the Rosenberg children were made aware of their Jewishness in these early years remains unclear. Siegfried had written that in Kassel the family observed Jewish rituals and holidays but were not ultrareli-gious and were quite opposed to the Zionist movement of the time. “Although we were Jewish with Jewish beliefs, we felt German.” Certainly Max and Hilda's young family would not have been brought up as devout Jews, but Teresina said they would probably have observed the Jewish Sabbath and attended synagogue on high days and holidays.

Anti-Semitism, though not at that time a serious concern to upper-class Jews in Romania, was clearly prevalent enough to persuade a man like Max Rosenberg that it made sense to emphasise his German rather than his Jewish origins. To be German in Romania in those days was to be highly respected.

Jews of their standing had little to do with lower-class Jews, said Teresina. Would they have been accepted by the elite in Romanian society? “Acceptance in Romanian society was certainly possible,” she said, “though not automatic.” As time went by, and certainly between the wars, Hilda let those around her begin to question whether she was a Jew at all. It was said that she had once converted to Catholicism but
immediately suffered a leg injury and, taking this as a punishment from on high for deserting her faith, converted straight back. Hilda was remembered as a simple soul, “somewhat childlike,” in Teresina's words. Teresina Mendl was one of only two people I found who had any memory at all of Vera's father. Like Vera, Max was “very calm,” she recalled.

By 1910 the Rosenberg business was growing fast. The German headquarters of Gebrüder Rosenberg Handlung had moved from Kassel to Cologne, from where Simeon Rosenberg that year sent a postcard to his grandchildren, “Lieber Vera und Ralph,” showing a photograph of the family's new apartment on one of the city's most fashionable rings.

Also that year the Rosenbergs and the Mendls cemented their business partnership by forming a global shipping company called Dunarea, which was notarised in London. The company had a fleet of vessels, and among its eight dredgers was one named Vera, which busily plied the Danube clearing silt.

In 1911, the year when Vera's brother Wilfred was born, the family's prospects continued to look excellent. The little Rosenbergs had new cousins now to play with: Nina Rosenberg gave birth to twin boys, George and Hans, and also in 1911, Cousin Fritz was born, in that same house in Domneasca Street. The very young Rosenbergs and their cousins were now raised together in Braila and Galatz in a rarefied atmosphere, rocked on verandas to the sound of clinking china teacups and pushed along the Danube by nannies in starched pinafores, who, in the case of Vera, Wilfred, and Ralph, would certainly have been English.

Meanwhile Max Rosenberg, who had already fought his way back from bankruptcy, had become one of wealthiest Jewish businessmen on the Danube.

In 1910 Galatz had eighteen synagogues and a yeshiva, or Talmudic college. At the back of wasteland on the edge of the Jewish quarter, we found the only remaining synagogue, surrounded by iron bars. Mr. Gold-enberg, president of the Jewish community, was in his adjoining office and willingly heaved hefty volumes onto his desk to scan lists for the name Rosenberg. He looked through Jewish burial records and a tome
listing Jews transported from Galatz to Transnistra, territory in Russia, occupied by Romanian and German forces in 1941, where Romanian Jews were worked to death in labour camps. There were Rosenbergs here—Rifka, Liuba, Soloma—but none I knew. “Was Max buried here?” Mr. Goldenberg asked. I had no idea, so he suggested it might be worth my looking in the Jewish graveyard. “We have our own Association for Victims of the Holocaust,” he said. “Our Holocaust here in Galatz. We are trying to account for as many as we can. We are getting new information all the time.”

Then he fixed me with a look and said: “We have even buried soap, you know.”

I said nothing.

“RIF! RIF!” he exclaimed. “You have heard of that?” And he kept saying, “RIF!” again and again because I didn't understand. Then he got a photograph of a gravestone. On the stone were carved the letters R.I.F. and underneath was an inscription in Hebrew that Mr. Goldenberg translated. “Here rest the bodies of our brothers turned into R.I.F. soap by the criminal Hitlerites during the Second World War.” The letters R.I.F. stood for Reichstelle Industrielle Fett, said Mr. Goldenberg. “The Nazis called it ‘clean Jewish fat.' It was on sale here in the central market— right over there. People bought it as soap. They didn't know what they were doing, of course. After the war they gave it back to us, and we buried it, here in the graveyard.” Mr. Goldenberg's certainty notwithstanding, stories that the Nazis used fat from Jewish corpses to make soap have never been proven.